ART-PRESENTATION: Cameron Jamie
Cameron Jamie’s work created over the past 20 years, ranges through a wide range of media: performance, video, sculpture, installation, photography and drawing, including examples of investigation around the notion of portraiture, self-representation, and collective identity. The artist is considered a precise chronicler of American and thus European tradition and lifestyle.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Archive
Cameron Jamie in his first solo exhibition at Galerie Kamel Mennour presents his new series of ceramic works which he has expanded and merged into his own personal language as an extension of his graphic and sculptural disciplines. Jamie originally trained in ceramic during his early school years which allows him to work through successive additions and effacements. His return to the “fired art”, which existed well before the invention of metallurgy or glassblowing, celebrates the plasticity of clay, a favorite material for children, and the peculiar, time-consuming creative process of ceramics with its firings and glazes. His sculptures, which cannot be described as industrious art, seem to alternate between taciturn and loquacious, organic and figurative. Jamie’s ceramic sculptures are formed from organic, hand-molded shapes and pieces; through repeated firing and glazing, the structures are glossed in an animated surface pattern of swirling lava varnishes with spectacular richness. On these ceramic plates, the imagery of Jamie’s automatic drawings of the interior and exterior of his figurative work, real matrices of his whole body of work, have been replaced by more slender, ethereal signs. From these mind maps, it is often the image of a flower that emerges, the scrollwork, fluid lines suggesting a head mounted on a graceful body. The sculptures are between totemic forms and mounds, these organic forms materialize in their own way an idea of the shapeless. At times their surfaces are smooth, or carry the imprint of the full-body grip of the artist in the throes of this vaguely anthropomorphic presence, topped with profiles in the shape of a bird’s beak. A projection of an interior self, the animal is here another variation in his effort at disfigurement. His sculptures are often described as a form of anthropological investigation; with this new mode of presentation we are invited in not only as voyeurs of the artwork’s often hidden interior space. The material exploration on display demonstrates the artist’s ability to traverse the conventional and experimental at once, re-imagining recognizable forms and expanding the discourse of ceramic and monotype.
Info: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 51 Brook Street, London, Duration: 17/5-23/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.kamelmennour.com
