Cameron Jamie
10 Sep - 08 Oct 2011
CAMERON JAMIE
Statuettes and Drawings
10 September - 8 October, 2011
Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present the second solo show by Cameron Jamie in its Paris space.
The practice of Cameron Jamie has a distinct place in the contemporary art scene. Born in Los Angeles and based in France since 2000, Jamie is known for his live performances, film works, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and installations, which embodies an on-going investigation of new and radical approaches into the way we look at ourselves and the world at large.
A new series of drawings in Indian ink alongside glazed ceramic sculptures will present a gallery of strange and elegiac, almost poignant figures that seem to question the nature of our human condition and our tragic destiny as social animals.
Jamie’s sculptures appearing to turn away form the visitor, retreating into an autonomous world governed by its own laws. In this way, he obliges the viewer to examine and confront them, in a vital process that may give rise to fear, to anger, or to love. This cathartic energy seems to inhabit the figures in both the sculptures and drawings, which are sometimes mute, and sometimes appear to be twisted by a muffled cry that echoes silently in space.
The ceramic sculptures are a recent development, a three-dimensional extension of the drawings that Jamie has been producing in prolific quantities since the early 2000s. Just as the artist lets his ink trace abrupt landscapes and biomorphic lines on the paper, so he allows the sculptures to “determine their own forms.” Clay, that substance with which young children make their first art, provides him with a primitive, magical relation to organic matter.
“A lot of these fragile creatures don’t make it as far as the exhibition,” explains the artist. “In ceramic there’s a lot of failures, of breakage, a strong experimental dimension.” The works presented in the exhibition are the result of a “big bang,” of an alchemical encounter between opposing forces. Going further than in his first ceramic pieces, which he showed at the Berlin Biennale in 2010, the artist worked on the bases of the sculptures by hand, in a bodily tussle with the material, producing unidentified artistic objects that look like half-bone, half-rock, in a range of colours going from gold to brown.
In going back to ceramics – the ancient art of fire – Cameron Jamie celebrates its profoundly time-based nature, dictated by the rhythm of the firings and the glazing of the clay. Intimately close to the natural cycle, this humble medium and intimate relation to matter make Jamie’s art the antithesis of so much industrial and spectacular contemporary art.
American artist Cameron Jamie was born in Los Angeles in 1969 and he has widely exhibited his films, installations, sculptures, drawings and performances internationally for over twenty years.
Cameron Jamie was featured in the 2005 Whitney Biennial and in 2006 he had his first survey retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curated by Philippe Vergne. The exhibition then travelled to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jamie made his first appearance at the Paris Festival d'automne in 2004 with the rock group The Melvins, who performed the sound tracks to his films, and returned to the Festival in 2006 with his film JO at the Opéra Comique which was performed live by Keiji Haino, a Japanese multi-instrumentalist. In 2010, Jamie was featured in the 6th Berlin Biennale, and recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "An Evening with Cameron Jamie" during which four of his films were screened: BB, Spook House, Kranky Klaus, and Massage the History. Following his much remarked contribution to the Pompidou Centre's Traces du Sacré exhibition in 2008, Cameron Jamie will be featured in the 2012 show « Les Maîtres du Désordre » organised by Jean de Loisy at the Musée du Quai Branly..
Statuettes and Drawings
10 September - 8 October, 2011
Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present the second solo show by Cameron Jamie in its Paris space.
The practice of Cameron Jamie has a distinct place in the contemporary art scene. Born in Los Angeles and based in France since 2000, Jamie is known for his live performances, film works, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and installations, which embodies an on-going investigation of new and radical approaches into the way we look at ourselves and the world at large.
A new series of drawings in Indian ink alongside glazed ceramic sculptures will present a gallery of strange and elegiac, almost poignant figures that seem to question the nature of our human condition and our tragic destiny as social animals.
Jamie’s sculptures appearing to turn away form the visitor, retreating into an autonomous world governed by its own laws. In this way, he obliges the viewer to examine and confront them, in a vital process that may give rise to fear, to anger, or to love. This cathartic energy seems to inhabit the figures in both the sculptures and drawings, which are sometimes mute, and sometimes appear to be twisted by a muffled cry that echoes silently in space.
The ceramic sculptures are a recent development, a three-dimensional extension of the drawings that Jamie has been producing in prolific quantities since the early 2000s. Just as the artist lets his ink trace abrupt landscapes and biomorphic lines on the paper, so he allows the sculptures to “determine their own forms.” Clay, that substance with which young children make their first art, provides him with a primitive, magical relation to organic matter.
“A lot of these fragile creatures don’t make it as far as the exhibition,” explains the artist. “In ceramic there’s a lot of failures, of breakage, a strong experimental dimension.” The works presented in the exhibition are the result of a “big bang,” of an alchemical encounter between opposing forces. Going further than in his first ceramic pieces, which he showed at the Berlin Biennale in 2010, the artist worked on the bases of the sculptures by hand, in a bodily tussle with the material, producing unidentified artistic objects that look like half-bone, half-rock, in a range of colours going from gold to brown.
In going back to ceramics – the ancient art of fire – Cameron Jamie celebrates its profoundly time-based nature, dictated by the rhythm of the firings and the glazing of the clay. Intimately close to the natural cycle, this humble medium and intimate relation to matter make Jamie’s art the antithesis of so much industrial and spectacular contemporary art.
American artist Cameron Jamie was born in Los Angeles in 1969 and he has widely exhibited his films, installations, sculptures, drawings and performances internationally for over twenty years.
Cameron Jamie was featured in the 2005 Whitney Biennial and in 2006 he had his first survey retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, curated by Philippe Vergne. The exhibition then travelled to the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jamie made his first appearance at the Paris Festival d'automne in 2004 with the rock group The Melvins, who performed the sound tracks to his films, and returned to the Festival in 2006 with his film JO at the Opéra Comique which was performed live by Keiji Haino, a Japanese multi-instrumentalist. In 2010, Jamie was featured in the 6th Berlin Biennale, and recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "An Evening with Cameron Jamie" during which four of his films were screened: BB, Spook House, Kranky Klaus, and Massage the History. Following his much remarked contribution to the Pompidou Centre's Traces du Sacré exhibition in 2008, Cameron Jamie will be featured in the 2012 show « Les Maîtres du Désordre » organised by Jean de Loisy at the Musée du Quai Branly..