Cameron Jamie

Tennis Elbow at The Journal Gallery presents a solo exhibition of work by Cameron Jamie that surveys the last seven years of his ceramic masks. These sculptures draw on a range of Jamie’s interests including rituals, performative traditions, and marginal realities to explore the transformative role of the mask in the formation of subjectivity.

In his theater without a theater, Jamie stages a series of inverted ceramic masks by installing them facing the wall. The masks negate a clear frontal view while they allude to a crossover of anthropological research and art history, as these themes resonate across the artist’s multifaceted practice.

Masks, like our names, like our bodies, seem to be merely substitutes for what really lies beneath them; but what can be revealed in their reversal? Is the mask the image or is the image the mask?

The surfaces of these brightly colored ceramics are animated by a pattern of lava-like patinas, registering Jamie’s longstanding investigation of the mask as a medium or form that reveals human patterns whether linguistic, behavioral, mental, and emotional. The archetype of the mask also provides evidence of the wildness at the core of civilization while its staging addresses elemental matter as being in some sense animate. The materiality of the masks becomes crucial in their formation as inscapes while their fascination lies in their unseen cores. The artist establishes two spatial or even geological fields: the seen and the unseen, the visible and the invisible to depict the full freight of the mask whether as image, object, or subject.

According to Isabelle Graw, linking art to subjecthood is not exactly a new move since there is an aesthetic tradition—from Hegel to Adorno—that treats artworks like "rhetorical figures of the subject." Hegel considers painting to be the art form that the "principle of subjectivity" had broken into, while Adorno considers the artwork to be a stand-in for the universal subject ("Statthalter des Gesamtsubjekts"). At the same time remaining responsive to the possibilities inherent within the artwork, theorists interpret art as a "mode of disclosure" (aletheuein) or a "scene of disclosure."

Nonetheless, if art is a mode of "un-concealing," "bringing to light" or coming to "presence," it follows that it would be epistemologically essential to understand what such modes of disclosure reveal. Heidegger’s differentiation between the terms "bringing forth" (hervorbringen) and "challenging forth" (herauforden) attempts to explain the ways existence (dasein) is brought-forth or un-conceals itself.

In the face of their inverted gaze, Jamie’s masks are brought forth as ontological devices or actors in an atemporal or rather multi-temporal reality that contains different historical periods. While the artist unmasks a version of contemporaneity, in his "scenes of disclosure," a universal subject is revealed as a possible agent of a new worldview(s).

Cameron Jamie was born in 1969 in Los Angeles, California.

Jamie’s recent solo and group exhibitions include "Cameron Jamie" at NICC in Brussels, Belgium (2019); "All of Them Witches" at Deitch Projects in Los Angeles, California (2020); "Abstract, Representational, and so forth" at Gladstone Gallery in New York, New York (2019); "May You Live in Interesting Times" at the Venice Biennale 2019 in Venice, Italy (2019); "The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn" at The Contemporary in Austin, Texas (2019); "Mask: In Present Day Art" at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, Switzerland (2019); "Futomomo" at CAC Brétigny-Centre d’art Contemporain in Brétigny-sur-Orge, France (2019); "A Higher State of Consciousness" at Galerie Eric Hussenot in Paris, France (2019); "My Head is a Haunted House" at Sadie Coles HQ in London, United Kingdom (2019); "Cameron Jamie: Solo Show" at Kamel Mennour in London, United Kingdom (2018); "Monotypes" at Kamel Mennour in Paris, France (2018); "Mask" at Kamel Mennour in London, United Kingdom (2018); "Spectres, ou les perspectives menaçantes" ICI Gallery in Paris, France (2018); "Backcovers: Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring" at Museum im Bellpark in Kriens, Switzerland (2018); "Cameron Jamie" at Bernier/Eliades in Athens, Greece (2017); "Cameron Jamie: Drawings and Monotypes" at Capri in Düsseldorf, Germany (2017); "Voyage d’hiver" at the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France (2017); "Point Quartz Flower of Kent" at the Villa Arson Nice in Nice, France (2017); "Dizziness: Navigating the Unknown" at the Kunsthaus Graz in Graz, Austria (2017); "Bodies, Faces, Heads" at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany (2017); "Cameron Jamie: Domestic Arenas: Massage the History, BB, Kranky Klaus" at Gladstone Gallery in New York, New York (2017); "Strength in Numbers: Photography in Groups" at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2016); "Void California" at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, California (2016); "Cameron Jamie" at Gladstone Gallery in New York, New York (2015); and "Cameron Jamie" at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens, Greece (2014).

He was a recipient of the Le lauréat du prix de dessin de la Fondation d’art contemporain Daniel et Florence Guerlain, France in 20016 and the Yanghyun Prize from the Yanghyun Foundation in Seoul, South Korea 2008.

Cameron Jamie lives and works in Paris, France.

Curated by Sozita Goudouna