Cameron Patricia Downey's 'Lord Split Me Open' builds remembrance out of found objects

 

Anyone else might see an abandoned leather couch on the corner and think nothing of it, or an old mattress on the side of the road and, at the very least, avoid it. For Cameron Patricia Downey, those kinds of objects are fuel for their art.

Their first major solo show at Hair + Nails Gallery, Lord Split Me Open, deals with the elusive nature of memory, archives, and exploring the remains of life lived. Walking into the exhibit might feel like stepping into a sort of Escherian antique shop. Every room of the building is spilling over with photography, video, and sculpture. Among trinkets, knick-knacks, and other objects affectionately called junk rest three pillars of the exhibit: a sideways couch nailed to the wall, dyed strips of mattress, and a resin-coated carpet sculpture.

Lord Split Me Open is about building remembrance and myth out of the minutiae of everyday life; Downey found that discarded mattresses, abandoned couches, and other trash became her treasure for the ways that they are vehicles of memory. “These are things we use over the course of our lives, depositing sediments on,” Downey says, “making archives on how we’ve lived, what kinds of days we’ve had.”

In their archival process, Downey is inspired by the works of Lebanese artist, Walid Raad. In the early ‘90s, amid the Lebanese Civil War, Raad used a fictional artists collective called The Atlas Group (consisting wholly of himself) to consider the ways in which we remember and make sense of history. Raad was concerned with the institutional remembrance and archiving of violent, traumatic events of the war, exploring whether it’s possible to look at reality objectively and questioning how a collection of facts can give us access to a subjective reality.

 

Top: Lord Split Me Open, 4-part installation. Bottom: Untitled, 2023. Silver gelatin print, 18 x 12”.

 

Take the leather recliner couch from which the exhibition name is derived. Worn and weathered, the couch wears on its face exactly how it was used. Prior to the exhibition, Downey underwent a week-long process of splitting it open; now, the two halves of the couch sit uncannily on the wall creating a frame for a screen print of a photograph that Downey took years ago. “They’re photos that I took as a child on this old digital camera that I'd never had access to until maybe a few months ago. It unlocked all these memories,” Downey says. 

Encountering Raad’s work came at a turning point in Downey’s own archival making when they were beginning to reject the line between the fact and fiction of memory. In previous attempts at thinking about what it means to archive, Downey wore a family member's clothes and created body prints on paper and fabric, making artifacts for and of those family members for Hair + Nails group show FUTURE FUTURE in 2020. “It’s almost like a performance of yourself, putting their clothes on in an effort to make fact from fantasy,” they explain.

To Downey, it’s helpful to use myth as a mediator of memory. Archives will almost always contain a lie because of individual projections of certain events — that, to Downey,  is where the artist's role is important. “In any colonial setting, it’s almost the duty of artists to bring art and archival as a concept to evidence and to remember things with myth in them, because perhaps the myth is closer to events that actually happened,” she says.

Attached to another wall of the gallery are mattress strips held together by a cord to resemble the flow of water. After finding them abandoned in a big bag, Downey dipped the ends of the strips in blue dye and screen printed a repeating image of a woman sitting on a couch onto a singular strip. Besides the literal, the mattresses also evoke memories of biological forms to Downey: straight on, the sculpture looks like a waterfall, and from the side, the strips mimic stratified layers of sediment. These images are brought forth as Downey allows herself to be guided by the material. Working with it to find connections to see what coincidences an originally abstract shape can evoke for her. 

 

Top: 613 Fountain, 2023. Dye, botulates, pine, mattress, 76”x 68”x 45”. Bottom: Detail from Lord Split Me Open.

 

The final pillar of the project was brought about in much of the same way: an abstract carpet installation that Downey sculpted out of fourteen attached carpet squares coated in resin. After rearranging them countless times, they came together in a shape that almost looks to her like flower petals opening. After becoming familiar with the shape and calling to more personal memories, it reminded Downey of a quilt blanket. “I was really interested in the way quilting was used in antebellum America. The way enslaved people used squares as a way to communicate without using words.” Downey’s exhibit works in much of the same way. It’s a form of communal meaning-making. Communicating your ideas, Downey says — whether in the arts, in the sciences, or as a way of survival — is a social practice, very much in community and in communication with the world around them.

After a handful of shows with Hair + Nails since 2018 and being a few miles from where she grew up, Downey says she wouldn’t have wanted her first solo exhibition going any other way. “This is where I’m from. A lot of my work has been concerning Minneapolis and my home and lineage and how I’ve come to experience life here,” she says. “It just feels really right.” ◼︎

 

Cameron Patricia Downey in their studio, 2023. Photo by Ryan Fontaine.

Lord Split Me Open is on view at Hair + Nails through June 3, daily by appointment or Thursdays through Sundays, 1 – 5 pm. 

To see more of the artist's work, visit cameronpdowney.com or follow them on Instagram @killkamdow.

All photos courtesy of the artist and gallery.