Meredith Laura Lynn and Katie Hargrave are artists and educators whose practices converge in a collaboration that processes and contextualizes historical, cultural, and environmental impacts on government-managed public lands. They work through multimedia and installation to create a highly research-oriented, self-implicating, and humorous critique of romanticized experiences in the great outdoors, examined through the lens of reality TV and social media. In their two vignettes of Bad Outdoorsmen (Application Video) (Northeast Florida), (2024), Lynn and Hargrave explore notions of a camouflaged history of naturalist exploration, the performance of constructing identity, and survival in isolation or through community, inviting a contemporary discourse on long-established narratives about wilderness and our places within it.
As the viewer enters the gallery, they encounter the first setting of Lynn and Hargrave’s Bad Outdoorsmen (Application Video) (Northeast Florida), with the second just beyond. All five monitors are set to play synchronously, inviting us to follow the artists’ narrative as it travels from screen to screen. Alternating backdrops featuring shifting landscapes, atmospheric skies, tumbling still lifes, jarring angles, and windswept portraits unfold across the four remaining displays, placing the viewer within a complex video collage of the sights and sounds of Northeast Florida’s maritime oak hammocks, scrubs, and pine flatwood ecosystems.
Hargrave is the first to speak in Vignette 1 as she and Lynn, outfitted in their rustling, hand-sewn ghillie suits, walk between a dense woodland and a busy road, droning with traffic. She addresses the viewer through the camera, but she is filming the POV for the producers of a TV program. The Bad Outdoorsmen videos serve as an audition tape for the History Channel’s reality show Alone, where survivalists compete for a cash prize by outlasting one another in desolate environments without help, with only their action cameras to record.
Between the native and built environments, Lynn and Hargrave catalyze a unique conversation with the viewer/producer about their choices of filming locations and why they would be adequate participants despite their demographics as women and artists from urban environments. Protected by their leafy suits composed of camouflaged episode stills, the artists reason that their skill sets are incredibly valuable for bushcraft (constructing survival necessities from limited materials deep in nature) and that even so-called quintessential explorers were not, in fact, as hardy as popular history has led one to believe.
Lynn and Hargrave draw on their research into three famous 18th- and 19th-century naturalists, artists, and authors: William Bartram Jr., John Muir, and John James Audubon, whose legacies have been constructed on their explorer narratives and tarnished by their discriminatory beliefs. The first of the three failed frontiersmen is William Bartram Jr., who, in 1765, along with his father, was commissioned by King George III to catalog and draw plant life in the British colony of Florida.
They returned in 1774 for a short scientific expedition, during which, Hargrave tells us, Bartram refused to eat survival food such as rattlesnake because he did not enjoy their flavor. Yet this artist remains a beacon for avid adventurers who continue to follow in his footsteps by traveling county trails and visiting the same state historical markers where Lynn and Hargrave recorded their introduction.
Lynn and Hargrave also travel to Mala Campra [Bad Purchase] in Palm Coast, where John James Audubon, renowned for his illustrations of birds and mammals in North America, stayed on a plantation for a few months during the Second Seminole War in 1837. The viewer learns that he left because he disliked the weather and the bugs, but he also feared being on Seminole land during a period of strong resistance to colonization.
A black-and-white night-vision confessional plays, purposefully cropped to echo the awkward video diaries on Alone. In it, Lynn recounts that John Muir, another naturalist, an early conservationist, and the most quoted man at the top of the show, loathed going solo during his 1,000-mile walk along an abandoned railroad track in 1867 through the new state of Florida, from Fernandina Beach on the east coast to Cedar Key on the west.
In Vignette 2, the artists have incorporated stills from episodes featuring Muir’s quotes as silk leaves sewn onto a studio umbrella, emphasizing that flashy quotes don’t necessarily reflect the reality revealed in Muir’s journals, which were published after his death. The identity Muir constructed for himself in his published writings lives on in the way contestants now perform as hardened, masculine survivalists, speaking to the camera and employing a variety of clichéd jargon and didactic lessons choreographed for TV audiences, as Hargrave and Lynn parallel for us.
Complementary monitors in both vignettes continue to move in the background as the artists stand isolated, holding onto nature, and then together, holding hands or facing one another. Their actions signify that vulnerability and reliance on others in community are both vital to and admirable for human resilience in potentially unfavorable circumstances, following the example set by Indigenous societies who lived abundantly in the landscape long before the Bad Outdoorsmen arrived.
