Sophia Brueckner: Hearts and Flowers: Hunting for Love

Opening Reception: Friday, November 7, 2025, 5-8pm

“Frankly, I make clothes for women to look sweet. I like sweet women. I see women’s role in life in the light of sweetness. Men should be the hunters. Women are the keepers of the hunters: it’s a straightforward, set philosophy of mine.” - Laura Ashley

“Disruptive camouflage” is a type of camouflage that uses patterns and color to hinder detection or recognition of an object's boundaries and/or other conspicuous features of its body. It involves the manipulation of the perceptual processing of its viewers. Laura Ashley was a Welsh designer known for her romantic floral prints and feminine designs with a bucolic feel. Like modern tradwife influencers, she promoted the idea of women as submissive wives and mothers to contradictorily become a breadwinner. Hunting camouflage is meant to render a person invisible while hunting, but wearing it has become a fashion statement in rural areas to show off one’s masculinity and dominance over nature. Sophia Brueckner designs new camo patterns that integrate Laura Ashley florals with Realtree hunting camo and use them to make gender stereotyped artifacts and clothing to subvert false binaries about gender, class, domesticity, and nature.