For the 2024 Armory Show, Night Gallery is delighted to present work by Amy Adler, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Sarah Awad, Barrão, Sarah Blaustein, Carla Edwards, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Tomashi Jackson, JPW3, Grant Levy-Lucero, Sarah Miska, Anna Rosen, Elaine Stocki, Claire Tabouret, Andy Woll, and Clare Woods. The presentation examines how artists draw upon histories of camouflage via strategies of obscuration, concealment, and disguise.
Visual artists first developed camouflage patterns during World War I. They drew on Cubist notions of disrupting line and form as they designed military wear to help soldiers evade recognition. Camouflage allowed troops to blend into their surroundings instead of standing out amid the day’s new aerial photography.
Sarah Miska plays with such tensions between pattern and rupture, fitting in and standing out. She captures the imperfections and grotesqueries of the high-end equestrian world: a mud-spattered blazer and mask, for example, or the stray hairs around a red bow. Miska’s patterns and clothing suggest sartorial traditions such as tartan, used to signify family allegiance.
Adler’s oil pastel works on canvas examine cinematic tropes. Extras—based on a photograph of background actors—features hunky soldiers wearing camouflage pants. The composition explores the performance of masculinity in entertainment and the military. Nice Girl depicts a young woman taking a selfie with a camouflage-covered phone. The device simultaneously hides her from the viewer and exposes her to a greater public.
In Akinbola’s CAMOUFLAGE series, durags are stretched and sewn beyond recognition. The series title reflects durags’ association with Black identity and evokes how individual durags blend into larger, complex abstractions.
Awad’s paintings feature figures emerging from pictorial space. Bold geometric washes are teased out as anatomy, faces, and appendages. The resulting paintings house fractured bodies camouflaged by abstraction.
In an age of ever-increasing scrutiny and surveillance, these artworks reconsider the pleasures and perils of being seen.