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.

Conversation:

Please join us on Wednesday, January 8th for a conversation between Cameron Patricia Downey and Taylor Jasper, the Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. The conversation will take place in Midway's gallery starting at 6:30pm and will focus on Downey's current exhibition, Super Deluxe, and their studio practice.

Come by at 6pm for a free book giveaway prior the conversation, including duplicate and deaccessioned titles. These will be available first come, first serve. Complimentary hot tea and snacks will also be provided.

About Cameron Patricia Downey:

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.

About Taylor Jasper:

Taylor Jasper is the Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center. Since joining the Walker in 2023, her curatorial projects and exhibitions have included This Must Be the Place (2024), a reinstallation of the Walker’s permanent collection; Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2024); Kandis Williams: A Surface (2025); Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love (co-curator, 2026); and Olalekan Jeyifous: The Road Became a River (2026). Between 2020 and 2023, Jasper was the Curatorial Associate for Visual and Performing Arts at the Momentary, affiliated with Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she supported several exhibitions including Yvette Mayorga: What a Time to be (2022);Cauleen Smith: Space Station: Radiant Behind the Sun (2021); Diana Al-Hadid: Ash in the Trade Winds (2021); and Garrett Bradley: American Rhapsody (2021). Prior to the Momentary, Jasper was a Curatorial Research Assistant at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she was an integral part of the curatorial and editorial teams for the exhibition and catalogue The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. Jasper was born and raised in Richmond, VA and received her BA in Black Studies and Art History from the College of William & Mary in 2018.

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm

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