Hugh’s Pole, 2025
Printed matter, 43 feet utility pole
Slemmons collection, Fall City Historical Society collection, Fall City Library collection, Snoqualmie Historical Museum collection, and Baxter Barn collection
In 1934, Hugh Hinds, a white man, carved a 43 foot totem pole in Fall City, Washington, to honor Julia Harshman, a white woman remembered for founding the local telephone company. Jack Chisholm photographed the scene, and over time, that negative became part of Rod Slemmons’ photo archive—eventually landing in a box in my living room after a studio visit with Jan Tichy. My first attempt to scan the image resulted in an indiscernible black frame. The error planted a question at the heart of this project: Can an image die?
My response to this image seeks to reflect the layered history of this monument without further solidifying its status as an icon. The pole deteriorated over time and fell over in a windstorm during the 1960s. A replica, commissioned by the town from a Tulalip carver in 1982, stood in its place until the “original” was restored by a troop of Boy Scouts in the 2000s. In 2023, the legacy of the object had succumbed to rot as the town reckoned with the cultural misappropriation of the monument and removed it from public display. When the Fall City Library declined to acquire the artifact, a community member paid to transport it to his property, Baxter Barn—one of the town’s earliest plots–and erected it once more, with the help of the local power company, strapping it to a tree beside other Americana sculptures.
My response presents a series of historic and original images from my research in Fall City. I’ve attempted to mirror the complex storytelling traditionally embodied by a totem pole, arranging 43 feet of printed matter that traces the evolving legacy of Hugh’s pole between 1934 and 2025. This act of unfolding the image parallels my work at a resale shop, where I research personal and cultural artifacts—both the excesses of our lives and, more broadly, the debris of American heritage, one item at a time. The persistence of an undying image resonates with the settler narratives passed down through my family—stories I was raised on and learned to question through a practice of close reading, examining both the texts themselves and their broader implications in contemporary life.
Camille Casemier is a Chicago-based artist whose work explores themes of collection, archive, and cultural legacy. Central to her practice is an ongoing re-examination of her English settler family history, the narratives she was raised on, and their broader implications in contemporary life. This exploration serves as a critical lens through which she examines the intersections of value, cultural artifacts, and collecting habits by individuals and institutions. Casemier’s studio practice extends into her day-job at a resale shop, where she continues to probe the cultural legacies embedded in accumulation and things. Her most recent project documents museum-goers’ interactions with shrouded vitrines in the Field Museum after the 2024 NAGPRA update, gestures of insistence reminiscent of the insistent language in her settler ancestors’ accounts. The project evolved into an ongoing collaboration with Selena Kearney that has taken the form of multifaceted performances as a container for their dialogue on heritage, preservation, and objects.
Her formative experiences with Bread and Puppet deeply influenced her sensitivity to the “liveness” of things, further developed through her studies of dance at The New School with Eiko Otake. Casemier’s projects tend to emerge from a single object, evolving into complex networks of gestures that unfold across pages, stages, and screens, often mediated by cameras and audiences.
She holds a joint BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now teaches in the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments. Her work has been presented at Festival Arte/Acción (Mexico City), the Indonesian Performative Drawing Forum (Yogyakarta), Re-Happening at Black Mountain College, Performance Art Studies #73 (Görlitz, Germany/Zgorzelec, Poland), and the Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium of the Chicago International Puppet Festival, among other venues. She is currently a remote resident with the Hong Museum in Wenzhou, China studying the legacy of fish jelly.