Rosie Clements: Faux Camo
Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Faux Camo, the gallery's first solo exhibition with photographer Rosie Clements on view from November 7 - December 19, 2026. Bringing together photographs of people and flowers UV printed directly onto bubble wrap, the exhibition explores the relationship between photographic representation, legibility, and the physical experience of looking at an image.
The photographs in Faux Camo originate from two distinct periods in Clements's life. Images of figures and crowds are drawn from photos Clements took in 2008 and recently rediscovered, while the floral photographs were taken within the past year. Despite their different subjects, the two series share a visual language of dense, overlapping forms and hyper-saturated color. Clements has described photographing a field of flowers as remarkably similar to photographing a crowd of people: formally, both a flower stem and a figure can be reduced to a line and a circle, and in years of printing on bubble wrap, they are the two subjects she has found that remain legible even at their most abstracted. The abstraction introduced by the bubble wrap further complicates this distinction; viewed at certain angles, flowers begin to resemble figures and figures to take on floral qualities.
Clements transforms these photographs through an experimental process of UV printing directly onto sheets of bubble wrap. Bubble wrap's regularly spaced cells function like a relief, interrupting the continuity of the photographic image and breaking it into scores of small, distended fragments. Viewed from a distance, the subjects cohere into a recognizable image, but approached more closely, they dissolve into color and texture. Clements further manipulates the surfaces by popping individual bubbles, introducing variations in texture across the works. The works' clear plexiglass boxes protect the photographs while inviting close inspection. On one hand, the encasements seem a natural extension of the material, as bubble wrap typically is used inside boxes. On the other, they introduce a tension between the tactile appeal of bubble wrap, which almost invites the viewer to pop it, and the protective barrier that prevents them from doing so.
Blur plays a central role in Clements' negotiation between image and material. In some photographs, such as Hypanthium, the blur effect is achieved in-camera, achieved through a slow shutter speed; in others, it is introduced digitally. Clements's distinctive, irradiant palette also draws on earlier experiments with analog film, which she manipulated through processes like microwaving and wetting. Across these techniques, Clements troubles a conception of photography as faithfully reproducing the visible world, instead offering it as a tool for interpreting and transforming it.
The exhibition's title, Faux Camo, is a suggestive phrase Clements once encountered by chance, spray-painted onto an electrical box. Is the disguise itself fake, or is it merely a redundancy? In either scenario, the phrase speaks to the fundamental gap between images and the world they depict. Clements's photographs make that distance between representation and reality visible, asking viewers what an image can become beyond its original function as a record.
Rosie Clements (b. 1990; lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024. She has exhibited with McLennon Pen Co and Megan Mulrooney, and her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, The New York Times, It's Nice That, and Southwest Contemporary.
