What is landscape, and can it speak, feel, and hear as much as a person? As artists, can we craft landscapes the same way that we paint portraits? How can the specific materials we select articulate the voice and messages behind our creations? In this workshop, artist Camille Hoffman will guide participants in exploring these questions through a combined process of painting, collage, and storytelling. Drawing from personal narratives and materials collected from everyday life, participants will craft new landscapes that speak to the outside world as much as to their own world within.

Camille Hoffman’s paintings are layered geographies, in which fragments of cultural objects are chromatically twisted and blended into complex wholes. From holiday-themed plastic tablecloths to dried paint shreds and found objects, Hoffman takes inspiration from Chinese landscape and Hudson River School painting, as well as the Philippine weaving and Jewish folk traditions of her ancestors. Disrupting visual perception, her scraps of materials take on new life, becoming a vehicle of spiritual agency for the artist amid the pressures of economic and political globalization.