Mary Tremonte

Camoutopia: Dazzle, Dance, Disrupt

Camoutopia examines the ways in which silkscreen printing and social
engagement mutually inform one another to create complex experiences and enact social change. Camouflage functions as a visual metaphor for social intersections I am facilitating, through shared interests in queer aesthetics, collective experience, and embodied exchange. In its failure at representing nature, camouflage calls into question what we consider natural, and in the tension between passing and dazzling, acts as a queer aesthetic. The silkscreen printing process, overlapping layers of color, creates areas of pronounced intensity, a lens and framework through which to view things differently. This phenomenon extends to social dynamics; the unanticipated and intense happens in the intersection, what Manning terms engendering, a process of becoming rather than being. I apply a pedagogical approach to print production and social events, after Helguera and Bishop, and draw from Muñoz’s theoretical framework of world making and futurity, giving form to Federici’s feminist reconstruction of the commons.