Bad Outdoorsmen: Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn

The Crisp Ellert Art Museum and Flagler College are pleased to welcome artists and collaborators Katie Hargrave and Meredith Laura Lynn back to campus for their exhibition Bad Outdoorsmen. Curated by former director Julie Dickover, the show will be on view from January 20th through April 19th, 2025. One of the artists, Meredith Laura Lynn will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday, February 7th from 5 to 8pm during the First Friday Artwalk. This event is free and open to the public.

During their 2022 CEAM Artist Residency at Flagler College, Hargrave and Lynn continued their research into influential environmentalists. Through previous projects, they had interrogated the legacy of John Muir, who came to north Florida in 1866. After spending time in the archives of the St. Augustine Historical Society, they expanded their research to include John Audubon and Billy Bartram, two other significant figures in the history of American conservation movements who spent time in St. Augustine, Florida. Bad Outdoorsmen chronicles the failures and difficulties these men encountered in this region and contextualizes their legacies in contemporary pop culture representations of the outdoors, particularly reality survivalist television shows.

In their exhibition at the Crisp Ellert Art Museum, Hargrave and Lynn continue to examine their own relationship to “public land” through a mock audition tape for the reality TV series Alone. Exploring the disparities between the survivalists in Alone and conservationists Muir, Bartram and Audubon, Hargrave and Lynn created 5-channel video filmed at locations visited by these bad outdoorsmen. Each episode of Alone begins with a quote from a conservationist, many from Muir. For their film, the artists gathered stills from the episodes of Alone starting with Muir quotes, cut the images into a leaf-like camouflage pattern, and sewed them onto full body suits. They then fashioned these articles after traditional ghillie suits, designed to disguise the wearer into their background. Hargrave and Lynn recorded themselves visiting sites where Audubon camped and Bartram tried to start a homestead. The show also features a wall-based textile installation of pages from Muir’s text, abstracted with drawings from Bartram and Audubon to explore the tropes and myths that contribute to our understanding of the outdoors. Through sculpture and video installation, their work interrogates how consumerism, mainstream conservation movements, the romanticization of western expansion, and attitude toward nature all interrelate.