Bad Outdoorsman: The Trailer Written by Brittany Clottey
I visited Bad Outdoorsman: The Trailer, on a chilly and crisp September evening. As I entered the space, my attention was pulled into two different directions. A video installation hung high on the wall on one side of the gallery as dramatic reality show music filled the room. On the other side was a collage of fabrics placed across the walls, silently waning in the fall breeze that carried its way from the outdoors.
The artworks in the fiber installation included laser-cut leaves sewn together in various sizes and colors—some in a vibrant cell-uniform orange and others in a camouflage green. The material was made of fabric reminiscent of tenting structures. Printed on these fabrics were images of bird species listed in their plain and scientific names: American Robin or Passeriformes Muscicapidae Turdus migratorius. Enveloped in between were blurry images of faces blending into the wilderness. Accompanying these images were pages ripped out of an excerpt from the book "A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf," written by conservationist John Muir.
I took a step closer to read some of the pages of this book. John Muir, the Scottish-American environmentalist proclaimed as the "Father of the National Parks," narrated his journey through the Floridian Swamps. In Chapter V, Through Florida Swamps and Forests, he calls attention to the various species of plants he witnessed for the first time and the novelty of the landscapes that drew attention to his Scottish past. "On board, I had a civilized conversation with a Southern planter…" he wrote, describing his interactions with the natives inhabiting the land. I took a step back to witness how these pieces came together. These texts, along with the birds and pixelated images interlaced between, felt like a fragmented narrative of the outdoors, much like one written by John Muir himself.
The works presented here in Bad Outdoorsman reminded me of the paintings by Chicago-based Indigenous mixed-media artist Andrea Carlson. Her work interrogates the concept of landscape paintings and their racist and colonialist origins. In an article by Noah Berlatsky, the Chicago-based writer describes Carlson's work as presenting "landscapes not as empty, but as full: of history, of trauma, of memory, of reverence, of time." The author references Ansel Adams, the American landscape photographer known for pushing concepts of "pure" photography, a devotion to the "precision of the camera," which erased Indigenous communities from the land they occupied for their contributions to its sustainment. Artists like Adams functioned much like John Muir, both depicting American landscapes as empty and void, conveniently depending on the erasure and dehumanization of the native populations they interacted with.
As Hargrave and Lynn suggest, although writers like John Muir are lauded for their contributions to conservationism, their racist origins ignore the long-standing stewardship indigenous populations provided to these landscapes. The hidden faces, naming conventions of the birds, and the dismembered pieces of fabric deliberately placed together all contribute to contextualizing both the exercise of power these conservationists subsumed in naming and identifying the wilderness and the incompleteness and fractured storytelling they depended on to further their claims. This installation is a visual representation of how writers like John Muir talk about "the wilderness."
Like Carlson, Hargrave and Lynn are interested in both contextualizing these colonial narratives and understanding how our relationship to natural environments is shaped by the media and artworks we consume. However, unlike Carlson, Hargrave and Lynn are interested in satirizing these elements rather than reinterpreting them. The video installation on the other side of the exhibition is a trailer for a series the artists are working on. This trailer is a parody of the History Channel-produced reality series Alone, which invites ten contestants (with experiences in nature of varying degrees) to inhabit the American wilderness for 100 days to win a $500,000 cash prize. Per the artists' suggestions, I watched the latest season of the Alone franchise. The unrelenting and unpredictability of nature quickly humbled each contestant, who boasted their high-level skills and experiences. Their inability to survive such harsh conditions independently creates this atmosphere of shame that furthers the individualistic idea that the outdoors is a space of conquest rather than reconciliation.
Hargrave and Lynn turn this narrative on their head by recreating elements and scenes from the franchises. Covered in the same fabrics as the fiber piece, their expressions mimic the confident contestants from the original series. The audio is borrowed from the opening sequence, and halfway through the trailer, the narrator states, "Battling extreme isolation and fierce predators, they'll endure merciless winds. Last one standing -- wins." The framing language from the trailer continues to further the lineage of Muir and his contemporaries. By recreating these stories, rather than reinterpreting them, the artists leave room for us to contemplate what is left for us to consider when the absurdity of the conquest is revealed. How does that change our relationship with the land and the stories we are told about it?
Together, the video and fiber installation draws parallels between the narratives of colonial environmentalists and their contemporary manifestations in popular culture and reality television. Hargrave and Lynn's exhibition is a humor-filled commentary on what happens when these legacies aren't interrogated across time and space and how they continue to affect our relationships with the land and ourselves. What makes us bad outdoorsmen isn't our inability to conquer it; it is our inability to reconcile the idea that the outdoors is a space that refuses ownership and conquest. As both John Muir and the narrator in the Alone franchise implicitly attempt to shape an adversarial relationship between humans and nature, Hargrave and Lynn cleverly showcase that our relationship to the outdoors can be reconciled when they choose to dress themselves in materials that make them a part of the environment.
Bibliography
“Ansel Adams: Pure Photography.” New Mexico Museum of Art, 3 Dec. 2021, www.nmartmuseum.org/exhitions/ansel-adams-pure-photography/.
Berlatsky, Noah. “How Artist Andrea Carlson Heals Landscapes by Dismantling and Reassembling Them.” Observer, 13 Aug. 2024, observer.com/2024/08/interview-artist-andrea-carlson-shimmer-on-horizon-mca-chicago
Writer Bio:
As the public engagement project manager, Brittany manages all the programmatic events and provides administrative support for public engagement activities. In addition, she oversees the Student Board and engages with Penn students.
Previously, Brittany was a research and curatorial intern at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, an editorial intern for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and a volunteered at the Boston Art Review. She cares deeply about community and education and her role at ICA allows her to engage with individuals from different backgrounds.
Brittany is a graduate of Northeastern University, where she studied politics, philosophy, and economics. During her time there, she researched the relationship between social and political ideology, critical theory, aesthetics, and visual culture and took classes in English, anthropology, art, and media/cultural studies. She also curated two photographic exhibitions that focus on Black life, archival imagery, the politics of representation, and public memory. In her free time, she enjoys listening to podcasts, reading, taking pictures on film, and making playlists for herself and her friends.