Walker Art Center to Present Cameron Jamie's First U.S. Solo Museum Exhibition
The first solo museum exhibition in the United States featuring the work of artist Cameron Jamie will be presented at the Walker Art Center July 16–October 22, 2006. Organized by Philippe Vergne, deputy director and chief curator at the Walker, in close collaboration with the artist,
Cameron Jamie
features works ranging from drawings to sculptural objects to films created over the past 20 years, including examples of investigations around the notion of portraiture, self-representation, and collective identity, many of which have never been shown together. Also featured is the artist’s acclaimed film trilogy (BB, Spook House, and Kranky Klaus) along with selections from his photographic studies, ephemera, and archival material collected during the production of the films.
Cameron Jamie has created a body of work centering around film and performance that documents various fringe rituals, including backyard teenage wrestling, Halloween spook houses, eating contests, and a winter visitation by mythical beasts. Working across materials and media, he frequently collaborates with street-portrait artists and celebrity impersonators as well as musicians such as the Melvins and Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino. The resulting work conflates investigative strategies, autobiography, mythologies, vernacular traditions, and urban folklore to examine contemporary life, our fascination with the outlandish, and our need for escapism—what one critic has identified as “backyard anthropology” or what the artist calls “social theater.” Along with an eclectic range of both early and recent drawings, visitors will traverse a replica of a mountain to access Maps and Composite Actions (2003), a room filled with drawings which metaphorically and literally address the notion of underground and the idea of mapping the unconscious and repressed. Also on view will be his most recent film JO (2004), which depicts an annual reenactment of the martyrdom of Joan of Arc in Orléans, France; a right-wing protest march in Paris; and the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, a Fourth of July ritual of gluttony held in Coney Island, New York. By juxtaposing such events and traditions, Jamie questions the way nationalism, if not xenophobia, has worked its way into the fabric of seemingly mundane social behavior.
In 1998, Los Angeles-born Jamie began an objective examination of the backyard-wrestling phenomenon in Southern California, which led him into an ongoing investigation centered on folkloric reenactments, horror amusements, or what he describes as “the different types of ritualized social theatrics in America.” Shot in black-and-white Super 8, BB (2000), part of the Walker’s collection, focuses on teenagers in backyards across the San Fernando Valley as they jump off roofs and throw chairs at each other, reinventing, out of adversity, the codes of mass entertainment wrestling. The second film, Spook House (2003), is set in a working-class suburb of Detroit as residents construct haunted houses before Halloween. With the eye of an anthropologist, Jamie documented residents transforming homes, lawns, and abandoned structures into spook houses and cemeterylike settings, trapped between good and evil, moral and immoral, in settings reminiscent of Danté. The final film of the trilogy, Kranky Klaus (2002–2003), chronicles the pagan celebration of Krampus in a snowbound village of Salzburg’s Bad Gastein Valley in central Austria, where each year on December 6, villagers congregate in homes awaiting a cortege of mythical elves and men dressed as horned, hairy beasts led by an elder bishop. Their performed grotesque ritual of “accepted” violence provides the cathartic experience of relieving daily abuses.
The humanistic quality of Cameron Jamie’s work, his collaborative practice, and his deliberate long-term engagement with his subjects bring to mind the tactics of “cine-ethnography” introduced by ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004), a pioneer of cinema vérité. Immersing himself in peripheral elements of contemporary culture, Jamie becomes an ethnographer in search of alternative strategies for understanding and interpreting the layers of our knowledge and cultural structures.
Jamie has shown his work at major contemporary art venues and at film festivals in the United States and Europe. Most recently he participated in Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and La Biennale di Venezia, Festival Internazionale del Teatro. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Cologne Kunstverein; Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; Musée du Louvre; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino; Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. Jamie is represented in the Walker’s collection and his work was included in its 2003 exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age.
Cameron Jamie is made possible by generous support from Tim Nye.
RELATED PROGRAMS
Screenings
Kranky Klaus/BB/Spook House/JO
Directed by Cameron Jamie
July 16–October 15, Free
Lecture Room
Program repeats every other hour starting at 11:15 am. Running time 105 minutes.
BB (2000, BW, Super 8 transferred to 35mm and DVD. 18 minutes; sound track by the Melvins) Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2003
Kranky Klaus (2002–2003, color, video, 26 minutes; sound track by the Melvins) Commissioned and produced by Artangel in association with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, with the support of the Delegation aux arts plastiques, Ministere de la Culture, France
Spook House (2003, color video, 19 minutes; sound track by the Melvins) Commissioned and produced by Artangel in association with the Centre Pompidou, Paris, with the support of the Delegation aux arts plastiques, Ministere de la Culture, France
JO (2004, color/BW, video, 42 minutes; sound track by Keiji Haino) Coproduced in collaboration with the Neue Galerie Graz am Landsmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, August 3
Book Club
The Artist’s Bookshelf: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides
Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab, 7 pm
Free, reservations required. Call 612.375.7600.
Eugenides’ debut novel takes teen angst to another level, diving head first into the extremes of its peer-pressured ceremonial violence. Narrated collectively by a group of boys, this darkly humorous story mirrors artist Cameron Jamie’s interest in the fringe rituals of American suburban culture. Before the discussion, join a free tour of the exhibition at 6 pm. Books for the Artist’s Bookshelf are available in the Walker Shop and at the Minneapolis Public Library (www.mplib.org). Presented in partnership with the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library.
Target Free Thursday Nights are sponsored by Target. Additional support provided by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.
Gallery Tours
Thursday, July 20
6 pm, Free
Friday, July 21
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, July 22
12 noon, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, July 27
6 pm, Free
Thursday, August 3
6 pm, Free
Friday, August 18
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Thursday, September 14
6 pm, Free
Friday, September 22
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Friday, September 29
1 pm, Free with gallery admission
Saturday, October 14
12 noon, Free with gallery admission