Camouflage 1, sculpture installation, review of Lois Andison
published in Lola Magazine, 1998


I hadn't seen Lois for almost seven years. We kept in touch through mutual friends but we hadn't actually seen each other since school. I knew we'd connect at some point, and it seemed fitting that the first work of Lois's I encountered since our student days was titled, aptly, Camouflage 1. This installation comprises two pieces: a torso (sculpture/antique mannequin) clothed in dried and pressed Queen Anne's Lace (a native wildflower of Ontario), with a four-piece kinetic collar which responds to your approach by sensor. The torso is first perceived at the foreground of the installation through a delicate scree of Queen Anne's Lace that are fixed onto vertical strands of fine thread and suspended from the ceiling. This part of the camouflage gently moves with the disturbances caused by your presence and movements, as well as naturally occurring air currents in the gallery.

In reuniting with Lois and her work I was struck with how consistent and authentic her work has been. As an artist Lois has always had an obsessive passion and vision. Her work is experiential, rooted in memory and deeply physical in content and form. References to nature either through choice of materials or thematically, highlights contrasts to urban existence and has continued to be expressed throughout her work. The intensity I remember of Lois was evident again with her collection of hundreds of the lace flowers, which took her three years to gather, press and finally assemble into artwork. It wasn't difficult imagining her doing this, having spent a weekend on a beach years ago helping her collect hundreds of stones for a site specific installation she was working on. I could see her painstakingly applying these fragile flowers onto the mannequin, attempting to humanize the figure, and considering the precise degree of flight/startle response in the collar's sensors.

I was interested in her choice of Queen Anne's Lace as a material since it brings with it both an historical (Queen Anne herself) and personal reference (Lois' love of nature and my own experience of living in the country). I perceived a literal translation of the material as the epitome of a female condition that is ever conscious of linear time and its consequences - frailty, decay, the struggle to preserve oneself in order to meet society's absurd expectations of everlasting beauty and youth. The collar engaged me in a different way. Its feeble flutters seemed a vain attempt at keeping intruders back; its movements served only to entice and intrigue me further toward it. I found myself trying to dodge the sensors by sneaking up on the mannequin from behind. I wanted to scrutinize the surface and compare the levels of decay taking place in this "flowerskin". I wanted to touch the latex underside of the collar.

The simulation of human skin on the underside, and the surface adornment of Queen Anne's Lace, combine with its kinetic responses to create a powerful suggestion that only a thin skin of careful camouflage separates us from the world. Camouflage, and yet, no camouflage is what I concluded. She wears her skin and she lives in her skin, both masking an internal and external state. Lois's installation reveals that we can't hide and that there is nothing to hide. We covet and compare, ruthlessly. We scrutinize and are scrutinized. But it is what becomes of our efforts that matter most. Will we have greater understanding, sympathy, generosity through our scrutiny? Perhaps, if we see through to the purpose of the camouflage.