‘Camouflage House’ is easy to find at Laguna Beach City Hall
It isn’t what you think of when you hear the word “camouflage.”
New York-based artist Tom Fruin’s “Camouflage House” — an A-frame metal house fitted with a mosaic of stained glass, some dyed blue, red, yellow and green — joined the catalog of the city of Laguna Beach’s temporary public art installations Monday evening following a brief reveal ceremony led by Mayor Bob Whalen and Arts Commission Chairman Adam Schwerner.
Spectators, residents and city officials gathered on the City Hall lawn, with several taking selfies with or standing inside the installation as the sun began to go down.
“It’s cute. It’s colorful. I want to hear the story behind it because I know it’s going to be completely different from what it looks like,” said Lisa Farber, a longtime Laguna Beach resident.
“It’s anything but camouflage,” Farber said. “The city always comes up with something we’ve never seen before.”
The installation was previously shown at Descanso Gardens in Los Angeles and Hudson Yards in New York.
It will be on display until April at Laguna Beach City Hall, 505 Forest Ave.
“I think it’s really beautiful,” said Aoife McEvoy, 15, from Newport Beach. “I think it goes with the whole kind of Spanish stucco architecture of Laguna and I think it’s really pretty. I think the [interior] lights make the stained glass pop.”
Aoife and her friend Wyatt Layton, 15, of Aliso Viejo said they weren’t sure of the piece’s meaning but interpreted it as a “light in the darkness.”
“I think it could also ... be about help and comfort out in the open, because the middle [of the installation] is all open and also it’s on a lawn in the public, not in a gallery or anywhere, so anyone could go up to it,” Aoife said. “And ... the stained glass reminds me of church, which churches ... are supposed to be comforting.”
“It’s just kind of reminiscent about that and finding beauty and comfort when it’s right in front of you,” she added.
Fruin, a California native from Manhattan Beach, said the installation is derived from the first series of art he made when he moved to New York in 1996.
Fruin said he was trying to discover where he was and started by picking up scraps of garbage and created a quilt.
“I was going to turn the whole concept of an American quilt — home, family, security, comfort, warmth — and turn it on its ear ... and it turned out they were kind of beautiful and they really ... spoke volumes about human behavior,” Fruin said.
“They weren’t at all sad. They were kind of celebrations of life. There were explosions of color,” he said. “From coffee lids and all this stuff, they were telling me what was going on in all the neighborhoods I went to.”
From the first quilt, Fruin began to make flags, which he felt were emblematic of specific communities, and started to understand where he was and his place in it.
“Camouflage House” is part of a series of other “icon” house sculptures made from salvaged materials.
“Camouflage is kind of a misnomer because it’s so vibrant,” Fruin said. “It has two sides. One is more Rasta [Rastafarian] colors like orange, yellows and red and the other side is more grassy and mossy.”
The two faces “kind of blend together — the more grassy side and the more warm side,” he said.
Fruin said he likes seeing how people interact with his public art installations, and he suggested spectators go inside “Camouflage House.”
“You’re meant to circumnavigate it. You’re meant to go through it, and I think at different times of day it has a very different feeling,” he said.
“Camouflage House” follows artist Mark Jenkins and collaborator Sandra Fernandez’s “The Caretakers,” which was retired Nov. 1 after its installation outside City Hall in August.
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