Lord Split Me Open | Cameron Patricia Downey

HAIR + NAILS (H+N) is thrilled to present Lord Split Me Open, a solo exhibition by Minneapolis artist Cameron Patricia Downey. This whole-building installation includes photography, video, and sculpture and comes with much anticipation for the local arts community as well as the gallery. Downey first exhibited with HAIR+NAILS in Brooklyn, NY at 9 Herkimer Place in 2019. Next, their haunting body prints on paper were included in an early H+N group show FUTURE FUTURE (2020).

The partnership between Downey and the gallery was deepened within the 2020 Uprising following George Floyd’s murder with her curation of Holding Space, a public installation of image, video, light and sound in the HAIR+NAILS front yard and front windows. As part of this, her riveting film “Hymn of Dust'' was projected on the gallery façade on loop every weekend night for the entire summer. Later in 2020 they took over the HAIR+NAILS basement with Three Things Last Forever, a show of photography and kinetic sculpture. Two large-scale sculptures by Downey were included in the HAIR+NAILS curated show The Human Scale at Rochester Art Center in 2021. In 2022 Cameron’s film Hymn of Dust entered the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.

Cameron Patricia Downey has had a whirlwind few years exhibiting nationally and internationally. Lord Split Me Open at HAIR+NAILS is their first major solo exhibition.

IN THE ARTIST’S WORDS:
Lord Split Me Open concerns itself with the prevaricating nature of local memory, archive, human refuse and paramountly, those soft and foul things– sprawling, cursory, bogging and minute, that mean and perhaps always will have meant that we’ve lived.

Mysticism, affect, dust and remains take central and material form in Split Me Open’s attendance to and obsession with accumulation and the sweet, parsing cleave that follows. — Cameron Patricia Downey

Artist Talk Saturday, June 3, 2:00pm
CAMERON PATRICIA DOWNEY with Walker Art Center Assistant Curator TAYLOR JASPER

 

GALLERY HOURS
Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00- 5:00 starting April 23 through May 28. Also, appointments can be scheduled 7 days/week via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.
 

ARTIST BIO:

Cameron Downey (b. 1998) 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; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (forthcoming). They are the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation's MN Art Prize, and are currently in residence with the Walker Art Center's Moving Image department and Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul.

Editor's Note: Learn more about the artist and the exhibition in our review by Cynthia Maya. Also, Downey has also written a number of articles for MPLSART.COM