“Feel free to sit in the limousine. This is an installation,” a gallery guide at Midway Contemporary Art told me. When I am told that I can touch art, I am momentarily filled with childlike wonder.
A stretch Lincoln Town Car named “Pleaser” is the star of Midway. I sit in my car, watching through the windshield as a stunning chandelier made of epoxy-coated ice pops, Hot Cheetos, and Little Hugs twirls on metal chains.
When Cameron Patricia Downey was learning to drive, she was taught to always consider the comfort of others in the car. “Then it’s followed by, ‘Your great-grandfather was a limousine driver in St. Louis,'” Downey says. This family history was the inspiration for Downey’s solo exhibition, “Super Deluxe,” at the new Midway Contemporary Art in northeast Minneapolis. It used to be a limousine garage, but now it’s a completely different place. It’s a theme reflected in the artist’s penchant for transformation.
Downey, who was born and raised in north Minneapolis, works in a variety of media to explore the “contingent, unstable, and misremembered,” and his practice is “archived in black blues life.” “I strive to create, expand, create altars, and bring fantasy and relationships,” according to the artist’s statement. In Super Deluxe, Downey blends personal matters with universal concerns such as class, labor, desire, and effort. Memory and fantasy come together and are used as effectively as the steel, chains, and pipes that bind many of the sculptures together.
Downey often works with found and discarded materials and is interested in the past lives of items. “What’s bothering them and how are they bothering us? What are they doing when I’m not looking? Or “When I’m not there?” they ask. “These questions felt prescient, not just for this show but more generally.”
The objects in Downey’s work reject their original purpose. Otherwise it is occupied. In Lux, the grapes are inedible, coated in epoxy and wrapped around a gold frame. Limousines aren’t going anywhere. Expected to be a flat, static floor, sheets of linoleum are spread out and draped attractively in “French curls.” Downey finds his way through a “philosophy of objectivity” that he is constantly experimenting with. They collect and group objects in spooky hoards. They completely disable a bright and previously attractive device.
“What happens when objects that were once forced to serve us are freed from that obligation?” Downey asks. “What if we treated these objects as having an inherent right to freedom? It would be naive to think that we have always succeeded, or will ever succeed, in seeing them eye-to-eye; This desire is the driving force behind my creations.”
They agree when I say that their artistic pursuits also reflect a great deal of care. “I love stuff,” Downey laughs. “Maybe that’s what draws me to sculpture: what the objects we live with do, what they mean, and how they affect us. But knowing that we created them and that they are an extension of us makes us want to know more about how they influence us just as much, if not more, than they do. “I think it’s the body,” they say.
“Tell it on the Rock” features a billboard-like combination of a white tank top (referred to as a “wife-pleaser” in the work’s description) and a skirt lined with pink acrylic nails. I’m here. It is ghostly, with claws dangling and isolated from the fingers.
“I was thinking about what is considered ‘ghetto splendor,’ a term sometimes used for urban black people who have access to a sense of luxury despite their material circumstances. This is an insult to my grandmother and the many black people I grew up around. I used to see women having these acrylic nails and using them as prosthetics to give them luxury even if they didn’t have a lot of money.My grandmother said, “Oh, nails. I can’t pick this up because of this,’” Downey laughs. “‘I can’t compress this or do that,’ ‘Can you do it for me?’ So this accessory constrained their movement and also became a way to call for help.” . The nails were a signal to others that yes, I need help doing this, that I am not alone, that there are people who can serve me. I have people who care about me. ”
super deluxe
Location: Midway Contemporary Art, 1509 Marshall St. NE, Minneapolis
Date and time: Until January 25th
Tickets: Free. Find Cameron Patricia Downey here.
