Afternoon Camp
Artist Residency
Afternoon Camp supports the arts by hosting artists each year to experiment, create and expand upon their practice.
2024
Ali Meyer & Kevin Phan
September | Afternoon Camp welcomed Ali Meyer and Kevin Phan as Afternoon Camp’s inaugural guests to the Artist Residency. While spending four nights at Afternoon Camp, the artists collaborated on a piece titled disintegration :: repair (2024)
disintegration :: repair (2024)
“At Afternoon Camp, we became aware of nature’s ways of fashioning itself. Within the holes that form (either due to degradation or providing sustenance for the organisms here), we were interested in how the foliage mended itself, and the infinitesimal species and lives within said foliage. Separated from the hustle of the day-to-day in the city, Afternoon Camp provided us a space to notice these natural phenomena and to reconsider ubiquitous understandings of value, obsoletion, and aesthetics. What are the capitalist expectations for productivity and what are prescribed signals of obsoletion?
With our piece, disintegration :: repair (2024), we address the organic systems we observed in the woods and pay reverence to the fauna through our creation of space. We emulated the camp’s environment through a video projection onto a sheer chiffon screen mimicking the spider webs found while at the residency. In the video, slugs, spiders, and pill bugs are overlayed onto recordings of light and a patchwork of leaves. These life forms engendered discussion regarding the dichotomy of decomposition and creation, and this movement of life into death. The plants give shelter and nourishment to the animals and when the wildlife dies, decomposers help provide nutrients back to the plants; the ecosystem maintains itself.
Our piece highlights and asserts the generative capacities of the aforementioned movement of life and death and offers an alternative to today’s economy of overconsumption and accumulation. Rather than giving into capitalist proclivities to discard anything that shows signs of long-term usage and disrepair, we should challenge longstanding ideas that conflate something’s value (or lack thereof) with its visual ‘newness’.”
Artist Biography
Kevin Phan: Installation during Another Day at the Orifice, RailSpur Gallery. Photo: Jacob Chung
Kevin Phan
interdisciplinary art
“Through my works, I have acknowledged the varying realities of the Vietnamese American experience. I confront the labor expectations and violences imposed upon my family using both video and photographic archives. Generally, the Asian American experience is haunted by losses: loss of culture, loss of agency, and loss of livelihoods. Unfortunately, there exist myriad voids and gaps across Asian American histories due to historic exclusions of Asians since America’s inception. In my navigation of the family archive, I create works that address these gaps and recontextualize our pasts as potentials and futurities that reject gendered and racialized rhetoric afflicting Asian America. What could have been if the U.S. had not intervened in the American War in Vietnam? How can we use unintelligibility to shirk consignments of the U.S. empire?” CV
Kevin Quang Phan (he/him) is an interdisciplinary artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. He earned his BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2020 and his MFA in Photo/Media at the University of Washington, Seattle in 2024. His work addresses the illegibility of Asians in the White supremacist state and how modes of illegibility can be used to reject homogeneity and push for Asian American autonomy and agency. Website
Ali Meyer: EMBODIED CHANGE II- VII (stills), digitized 16mm film loops, projected, 00:00:01:91, 2024
Ali Meyer
photography, video, film
“In the new digital age, the idea of “identity” has become a proxy for understanding the background and attributes of a person without ever having to dig deeper. While we can find joy in identifying with others, labels that denote identity have often been weaponized by the systems that oppress us to separate, homogenize, and dehumanize.
With this understanding, I am interested in exploring the limitations and delineations of identity through an autobiographical practice of film, photography, video, and performance. As I find ways to situate myself within the world, I use my lens of queer experience to explore the constant change in self we are all beholden to. My work is often either manipulated by digital systems or physically marked by my hand to exemplify the dichotomy of systemic identification versus the complex joy, power, and even shame of refusal to be singular. In doing so, I hope others can turn inwards and examine the complexities of their own lives outside of the systems that make identification so rigid.”
Ali Meyer (They/ them/ elle) was born in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1999. They received their BFA in Film at the University of Central Florida in 2021 and received their MFA in the Photo/Media program at the University of Washington in June 2024. Their current practice explores the limitations and delineations of identity from an autobiographical perspective through photography, video, and film.
In addition to academic work, Ali has also served as a leader and organizer in the Sunspot Cinema Collective in Orlando, Florida, paneled at the University Film and Video Association’s national conference, participates in local drag and music communities, and has shown work in multiple group shows in Orlando and Seattle. They currently live and work in Seattle, Washington.
2025 Applications
Each year, Afternoon Camp hosts artists on the Hood Canal to support creative pursuits in an ecologically diverse landscape.
Available May 15, 2025