CAMERON JAMIE AT THE ARMORY SHOW

CAMERON JAMIE AT THE ARMORY SHOW
07.03.2018 - 11.03.2018

THE ARMORY SHOW
Two Palms is pleased to present our first major project with the artist Cameron Jamie.

CAMERON JAMIE

Two Palms is pleased to present our first major project with the artist Cameron Jamie. Across his practice Jamie investigates ritualistic customs, mythologies, and folkloric traditions that lie at the fringe of popular culture through films, ceramic sculptures, photographs, drawings, monotypes, and artist books.

These large-scale watercolor monotypes, with imagery that is at once refined and primitive, archetypal and spontaneous, reveal both the working strategies and conceptual underpinnings of Jamie’s artmaking practice.

The alchemical cycle of construction and destruction, building up and erasing that has been a theme throughout Jamie’s oeuvre is evident in his approach to printmaking. Six-foot tall wooden blocks, each with a different grain, are arrayed about the studio. The artist approaches each block with a different tactic: creating finely-drawn lines that summon unknown biological structures reminiscent of spores, flowers and skeletons; sponging, pouring, scrubbing, daubing, and wiping colored washes; tearing apart any work he’s done with a pressure washer; constructing airy, airbrushed atmospheres on one while another holds dense, graffiti-like layers; and finally leaving to physics the chance outcome of driving all these elements together under the force of a million pounds of pressure in an industrial hydraulic press. The common thread of all of these approaches is the desire to unleash the unconscious compulsions of his reptilian brain and discover a spontaneous form-finding process.

Cameron Jamie was born in Los Angeles in 1969 and has lived in Paris since 2000. His work has been shown widely and internationally. He has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2017), Kunsthalle Zürich (2013), and the Walker Art Center Minneapolis (2006). He has taken part in the group exhibitions “Voyage d’Iver” in Versailles (2017), “Infinite Mix” at the Hayward Gallery (2016), the Lyon Biennale (2015), the Berlin Biennale (2010 and 2008), The Whitney Biennial (2006) and the Venice Biennale (2005). In 2016 he was awarded the Guerlain Art Foundation Prize for Drawing.

Jamie has staged film performances of his work The Museum of Modern Art (2011), California Institute of the Arts (1994), University of California's Royce Hall (2004), the Venice Biennale (2005), Festival d'Automne in Paris (2006), Symphony Space (2006), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2007).

His films include Massage the History (2010), with a soundtrack by Sonic Youth. BB (1998-2000), which traces the phenomenon of backyard wrestling in Southern California, with a live score by the metal punk band the Melvins; Kranky Klaus (2002-03), which takes the Austrian Krampus ritual as its subject; and JO (2004), which is scored by Japanese noise artist and composer Keiji Haino and investigates nationalism, patriotism, and bigotry in celebrations in Orléans, France and Coney Island, New York. Jamie’s films have been included in numerous film festivals and film biennales including the Berlin Biennale, Cineteca National Mexico, the Festival Internacional de Cine de Gijón, Gijón, Spain and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.