Cameron Jamie
Works on Paper and Statuettes
Opening October 4, 2024 / 6 – 9 pm
Exhibition October 4 – November 2, 2024
Out of freedom I would lick them.
Out of freedom I lick them.
They both point with their fingers: there!
There, it strangles, roots out, and God produces
A waterfall over your head.
– Tomaz Salamun
When you stare into a body of water, what you are aware of seeing is just a small piece of what you’re actually looking at. The true scope of what you’re taking in is much greater than what one can consciously comprehend. I get this same feeling when I look at Cameron Jamie’s work. My senses blur, and I am moved by what I do not know.
Cameron’s ceramics–statuettes, he calls them–are creaturely, even cute, embodying the playfulness that is so fundamental to this work, while also being, unabashedly, a touch grotesque. Faces glom onto limbless bodies in a way that is almost parasitic, uncontrolled. When viewed as a group, the statuettes seem to evolve and reproduce, even to exhibit sociality, bringing to mind the “backyard anthropology” Cameron first became known for, as if he has now turned his sights toward the study and cataloging of this new species.
The ink drawings further demonstrate Cameron’s particular curiosity. One gets the sense that he is asking questions of his materials, and that, if not an answer, these drawings show us an edge of possibility. Elegant and brutal, there’s a receptivity to these pieces, like they are listening and being listened to.
In both the drawings and the sculpture, there is a molten quality, a kind of fluctuation. The fixed and the wet, the bodies and the blotches. The line that never stops moving, like the line of a mouth before it settles into expression–pure impulse on the border of its own destruction.
And this, perhaps, is the secret heart of this work. What makes me look and look again. In every piece, you also find the program for its undoing. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s Imp of the Perverse, Cameron’s work is driven to contemplate, gleefully, precisely what threatens to destroy it.
Elaine Kahn, September 2024