Super Deluxe | Cameron Patricia Downey

Super Deluxe circles and jaunts around codes of luxury, pleasure, service and gameplay by a jostling of material, personal recollection, flavor and motion itself. In a sociopolitical context wherein the concept of wealth has footed itself entirely on a project of expropriation and dispossession, the ‘luxurious’ becomes a station riddled with precarity. What is ‘fabulous’ and what is ‘Ghetto Fabulous’ often is in constant, if not eternal flux. Luxurity then is a performance — a signifier with no sign, a wealth with no home. This body of work comes about by way of vinyl flooring, gold plating, limousines and cornucopias of pork rinds. At the end of the ride and at the nexus of both the ghetto and the fabulous is a road map towards making oneself cared for —if only for a moment— against the odds of material condition.

Cameron Patricia 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’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; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Strada Gallery, New York. They were the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation's MN Art Prize and are a recent artist in residence with the Walker Art Center's Moving Image department, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency and Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science and is currently a first-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the Yale School of Art.

Image: Cameron Patricia Downey, Shatona, 2024. Inks on paper.