Camo

is a meditation on how place registers through color—subtly, peripherally, and often unconsciously. This body of work began with an effort to slow down and isolate the overlooked hues embedded in everyday environments. Using a camera and Photoshop’s color picker, I sampled colors initially not from dominant features, but from the background: shadows, distant foliage, sunbleached walls—tones we often register only in passing. Sources came from familiar spaces: coastlines, yards, trails. Over time, I extended the archive, pulling from older photographs and travels.

The project took on structure through camouflage—a visual system designed to abstract and dissolve the boundaries of a subject. Camouflage doesn’t just conceal; it interprets. It reduces complex environments into modular, repeating shapes and tones. I was drawn to it both aesthetically and conceptually—as a pattern built from its surroundings, and as a metaphor for how we move through place, blending in, noticing, and forgetting.

In early stages, the work was purely abstract: camo patterns composed entirely of sampled color. But as I refined the process, I began reincorporating photographic fragments—small, cropped traces of the original environments. These elements restored specificity without overt representation. They act almost like fossils, evidence.

Each piece includes a set of geographic coordinates, allowing viewers to locate the original source if they wish. It resists narrative titling and instead invites exploration. It also mirrors the project’s quiet intent: to document memory, perception, and place without imposing a fixed reading.

This is ultimately a study in translation—of light into color pixels, memory into pattern, and landscape into abstraction. It repositions background information as the central subject, inviting a reevaluation of the visual data embedded in familiar environments. By isolating and reconfiguring sampled color, the work emphasizes the structure and nuance of place, stripping it of narrative and focusing instead on chromatic and spatial relationships. The intent is not expressive but observational: to document, distill, and reframe environmental information that typically goes unexamined.