Joakim Derlow camouflage exhibition in Stockholm

Derlow Exhibition (Stockholm)

Joakim Derlow describes himself as an “artist from Sweden with outposts in Amsterdam and Stockholm.” I think he first contacted me very early this year, because of his great interest in camouflage and especially (myself as well) in art and camouflage compared. Since then we have batted emails back and forth, along with images, research references and quotes. During most of the year, he has been preparing for an exhibition on the subject, as well as a publication in which he collects and assesses a medley of historical finds.

I have just last evening received from him an email with photographs of his on-going exhibition. Two of them are included here. They show the installed exhibition in Stockholm. As he states in his message, and as is clearly evident in the photographs—

Central in the space is a camouflage net made together with Ukrainian refugees living in Poland. The net manifests the artistic quality of camouflage in the art space before it is sent to the frontlines by the end of the exhibition. An object that passes between the decorative and the utilitarian depending on what side of the border it finds itself. Other works are uniforms mounted on stretcher frames to once again become paintings like the artists that made these camouflage patterns in the first place.

If you browse around the visible space in the photographs, you can see quite a few art and camouflage icons. Among my favorites is the elongated black rectangular panel on the wall, very nearly ceiling height. It is a cut-out silhouette of a bird (no doubt a pheasant), like those that Abbott H. Thayer proposed (another bird flies over the top).

Also, among my favorite features is the wall-mounted moulding on the right wall, from which book-like clusters of pages are hung from wooden pegs. I applaud the otherall color scheme. But this moulding with things suspended from pegs reminds me of comparable racks on which the Shakers hung their chairs, to suspend them while they swept the floor.

It is so encouraging to see that Joakim has succeeded in bringing all this together. You may be able to follow his work at <https://derlow.net/>. It’s my understanding that he plans to take this further, to an even more ambitious stage, and perhaps it will become a book.

By wonderful coincidence, last evening, as I was reading Joakim’s email, my wife Mary came in from the garden to tell me that while she was picking beans, she touched what was not a bean but a beautiful praying mantis—same size, shape and color, of course. Now, this morning, she has taken me out to the garden, and we have been able to find the praying mantis again—it is still hanging about in the beans.

Derlow Exhibition (Stockholm)

 

cut-out silhouettes of skunks / embedded figures

Cut-out silhouettes of skunks

Above In a recently posted video on Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (2021) I demonstrate the use of cut-out silhouettes by American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer, who worked in collaboration with his son, Gerald H. Thayer, in the study of protective coloration in nature. 

[During World War I] Thayer objected to the use of field service uniforms of plain, one-color fabric. He thought it was better to break it up, to counter the shading from overhead light, and to generally make it confusing.

At some point, he announced that he had come up with a simple method by which any soldier, in any setting, could determine his own best camouflage pattern. This too made use of cut-out silhouettes. All a soldier needed to do, Thayer proposed, is to cut out a silhouette of his own figure (or the generic shape of a man), and to study the colors and patterns that appeared in the hole of the figure when observed in his surroundings. He had already explored this photographically to recreate the patterns of, for example, birds and skunks [as shown above]…more>>>

• Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk) at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

• Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM>

• Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4>

• Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y>