Gossamers Volume III: …And Find Out

Moving Image artist-in-residence Cameron Patricia Downey investigates films from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection in and of conflict for their final curated playlist of the Gossamers series, exploring the entropy of anger and the acceptance of discord as freedom and release.

Note: This collection playlist streamed online from 10/10/2023 to 10/24/2023. The works are now on view for free in the Walker’s Mediatheque, open during gallery hours.

I’m thinking lately, on the eve of what’s widely known as a diplomat’s season, about how we perform anger, aggression; how it is we make home in conflict? I’m wondering if and when this place is an itchy one, if and when it’s full with play. Is all at stake? Or is it just all of mine. Is none?

Is it a freeing thing to brawl? Is the only way towards some free, a wrangling? How do we decide to throw the first punch, drink, brick, or jab? And what follows? Is it exchange? Freefall? Does the moral arc of a beat down bend, necessarily, toward justice? How much of it all is a thrusting through the cowing sense that something. just. ain’t. right?

I’d say that sometimes, a fight is simply the first catalytic point after which entropy takes lead and hold. I’d say that sometimes, even after, we sit in a holding pattern, oscillating and gyrating between statically charged peaks and troughs of the irate. I’d say that sometimes, the fight isn’t a fight at all. Sometimes, it’s just a dance.

And as much as walls are blown through, as much as pints shatter and grunts plume out, as much as shrieks fall to meet the cold still. And stares leave a twitch. The fight is, almost always, necessary. Absolutely.

This collection playlist streamed online from 10/10/2023 to 10/24/2023. The works are now on view for free in the Walker’s Mediatheque, open during gallery hours.

Cameron Patricia Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. Seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2021); Engage Projects, Chicago (2021–2022); as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program (2022); M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (2023).

Major support to preserve, digitize, and present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.