Parenthetic Passages 

Camille Hoffman

HUB Gallery | HUB-Robeson Center 

May 30, 2025 – Oct 30, 2025 

Reception Date: Friday, May 30, 2025 | 4 - 6pm    

University Park, Pa. – The HUB-Robeson Galleries are excited to present Parenthetic Passages, a site-specific installation by New York based artist Camille Hoffman that explores interconnected narratives of deep ecological time and ancestral history. Parenthetic Passages is on view in HUB Gallery from May 30, 2025 – Oct 30, 2025. HUB Gallery is open daily from 10am – 6pm.

Camille Hoffman is a painter who critically reimagines the romantic American landscape through layered and immersive site-specific installation. In Parenthetic Passages, she creates an environment that emphasizes the wisdom of water and the concept of shell memory, reflecting on the evolving relationships and accumulated human experiences alongside oceanic knowledge.

Drawing inspiration from her ancestral roots in the Philippines and meaningful transoceanic exchanges with Indigenous wisdom keepers from the Americas, Hoffman poetically transforms unconventional materials, such as nurses' gowns, mass-produced landscape prints, and piña cloth, into layered geographies. Mastering a handwork of collage, sewing, and painterly gesture, Hoffman’s creations challenge colonial narratives while serving as portals for healing and reconnection. She builds sacred in-between spaces through this tactile transformation, evoking a sensory experience of moving between multiple places and identities at once.

The expansive, site-specific mural that spans the gallery walls for Parenthetic Passages offers an immersive experience and encourages viewers to engage within the space. Its monumental scale prompts contemplation of water not just as a resource, but as a relation that Hoffman describes as "the womb of installation”. Layered in her mural, is a sculpturally creased diptych on brown paper which references her research into shell middens—ancient archaeological accumulations of shell mounds that have marked human presence along global shorelines, from the East Coast to the Philippines, for millennia. Much like the concentric rings of a clam shell, recording centuries of environmental conditions, Hoffman's art encompasses multitudes: transoceanic mythologies, critiques of ecological degradation, and reflections on shells as archives of environmental wisdom, cultural memory, and ancestral connection suspended between past and present. Parenthetic Passages invites us to consider how personal narratives intertwine with collective histories and how water carries memory across time and distance.

About the Artist
Camille Hoffman (b.1987 Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Yale University (2015), a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and abroad, and has been featured in Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, and The New Yorker. Solo exhibitions include Motherlands at Form & Concept (2022), See and Missed at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2022), Landing For Lolo at NADA House Governors Island (2021), Excelsior: Ever Upward, Ever Afloat at the Queens Museum (2019), and Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2018).

Camille Hoffman currently lives and works in New York, NY and teaches at The Cooper Union and Yale University.

For more information on this and other exhibitions, contact HUB-Robeson Galleries at (814) 865-2563, or visit their website at studentaffairs.psu.edu/hub/art-galleries. Class, student organization and office visits are welcome! Email Galleries@psu.edu with inquiries. Keep up to date with HUB-Robeson Galleries by signing up for their Listserv or follow them on Instagram @hubrobesongalleries.     

Contact: Robert Sparrow Jones, Curator and Senior Gallery Manager, HUB-Robeson Galleries (814) 865-2563, rkj5315@psu.edu