Since the 1970s, Chicago- based photographer Patty Carroll has become known for her use of highly intense, often life-size, saturated color photographs. Especially in her most recent collections, many of Carroll’s images address women and their complicated relationships with domesticity, identity, and excess. Her photographs of draped women camouflaged by domestic items create a humorous game of seek-and-find between the viewer and the anonymous woman in the image.

The Grand Valley State University Art Museum collection has several examples of Carroll’s photographs from her series titled “Anonymous Women: Reconstructed.” In each image, a woman becomes part of her excessive domestic trappings and activities, commenting on the obsession with collecting, designing, and decorating, inviting hilarity and pathos in our relationship with “things.” The photographs are taken from installations made in Caroll’s studio using household objects as subject matter. A mannequin substitutes for the woman, where camouflage and anonymity reach their logical conclusion of extreme absurdity, as she perpetually disappears into the artifice and visual overload of colors and patterns in her environment.

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