Bernier-Eliades Gallery is pleased to present the second solo exhibition by Cameron Jamie.
The practice of Cameron Jamie has a distinct place in the contemporary art scene. He is considered to be one of the most radical and influential artists of his generation who throughout his career has always created his work against the grain of artistic conventions. Throughout his live performances, film works, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and installations, his art embodies an on-going investigation of new approaches into the way we look at ourselves and the world at large.
This exhibition of new works at Bernier-Eliades consists entirely of drawings which have always played a major role in Jamie’s artistic practice. These works were first exhibited in the artist’s solo museum exhibition in June – September 2009 at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes.
Cameron Jamie offers through his drawings an alchemy of poetic universes which flow between the figurative and the freely abstract. In his latest works, Jamie merges figurative and anthropomorphic elements with visceral splashes and smears, creating hallucinatory realms of expression. Beneath the chaotic surface of free-flowing forms, one sees the order and layers of dislocated iconography: anatomy, faces, eyes, plants, animals, tubular webs, masks and hybrid monsters.
As stated in an essay by Marie-Laure Bernadac:
“His drawing grows with the expansion, destruction and reconstruction of an organic movement, similar to that of the spider, which devours its prey on its web. The burden falls on duality: the duality of personality as shown on a sketch with two bodies and heads, but also the duality of man-animal as in a bizarre form that ends in a scorpion’s tale or spider’s legs. This schizophrenia manifests itself with the passion for disguise, play and masquerade. For Cameron Jamie, the artist’s role is to bring to light the primordial instincts of the collective unconscious, the archaic myths of violence and cruelty that the entire Humankind shares, regardless of culture…”
Cameron Jamie was the subject of a major retrospective at The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2006, which traveled to MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA in 2007.
Other selected solo exhibitions include : Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Nantes, France (2009), Festival d’Automne, Paris, (2006), Teatro Goldoni at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2005), Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria (2004), and Artangel, London (2003).
Selected group shows include : Traces du Sacré at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2008), Amateurs at the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2008), Panic Room – Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection, Deste Foundation, Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens (2007) the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2006), and How Latitudes Become Forms at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2003).
Cameron Jamie was the subject of film retrospectives at The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Netherlands, (2008) and at the Festival International de Cine de Gijon, Gijon, Spain, (2008).