Final Project – Wilson Ekern

For my final project, just as in the previous, I continued investigating camouflage. This project took the form of a Tyvek mask, constructed out of shipping envelopes from the United States Postal Service. I printed eyes in red and blue on different parts of the mask, working with the classic American color scheme we all know and love. I used the eyes motif in the construction of the mask as well, stitching variously colored eyes all over the surface of the mask, alternately covering or revealing the printed pattern and colors underneath. I cut out some of the prints in a pattern reminiscent of woodland camo, but just stitched these shapes back onto the eyes, creating no high-contrast pattern disrupting the outlines, but instead disrupting the pattern itself.

With this project, I wanted to investigate surveillance, occlusion, the omnipresent, all-seeing eyes that we spend our days living under, and what is revealed and hidden by these eyes. The mask has no eyeholes; it obscures the sight of the wearer, but is itself covered in eyes, of differing colors and shapes, obscuring and revealing their own eyes and structures, shrouding the wearer in a riot of shapes and edges. When you can’t see out, who is doing the looking for you? The lies of false surfaces, books becoming their covers, becoming entirely cover. We’re all stuck inside Yog-Sothoth, living in the head of the omniscient, but knowing less and less ourselves.