“Feel free to sit in the limousine. It’s an installation,” the gallery guide at Midway Contemporary Art tells me. Being told I can touch the art fills me briefly with childlike wonder.
The stretch Lincoln town car, titled “Pleaser,” takes center stage at Midway. Seated inside, I watch through the windshield as a glorious chandelier made from epoxy-coated Icee Pops, Hot Cheetos, and Little Hugs twirls upon its metal chain.
When Cameron Patricia Downey was learning how to drive, they were instructed to always think about the comfort of the other people riding in the car. “That would be followed up with: ‘You know, your great-grandfather was a limousine driver in St. Louis,’” Downey says. This piece of family history would inspire Super Deluxe, Downey’s solo exhibition at the new Midway Contemporary Art in northeast Minneapolis—previously a limousine garage, now something else entirely. It’s a theme that’s echoed in the artist’s proclivity for transformation.
Born and raised in north Minneapolis, Downey works in various media to explore “the incidental, the precarious, and the misremembered,” and their practice “strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation,” according to their artist’s statement. In Super Deluxe, Downey blends the personal with universal concerns of class, labor, aspiration, and striving. Memory and fantasy coalesce, employed as effectively as the steel, chain, and pipe that hold many of their sculptures together.
Downey often works with found and discarded objects, and they’re interested in the past lives of items. “What haunts them, and how do they haunt us back? What do they do when I’m not looking? Or when I’m not there?” they ask. “These are questions that have felt prescient with this show and more generally also.”
The objects in Downey’s works refuse their intended purpose. They are otherwise occupied. Grapes, coated in epoxy and wound around a gold frame in “Lux,” are inedible. The limousine goes nowhere. Sheets of linoleum, expected to be flat, static flooring, unfurl and drape themselves glamorously in “French Curl.” Downey is finding their way through a “philosophy of objecthood,” something they experiment with constantly. They gather and group things together in eerie hoards; they render bright, previously alluring devices totally defunct.
“What happens when the objects once compelled to serve us are freed from their duties?” Downey asks. “What if I am to treat these objects as having an inherent right to freedom? It would be cocky of me to think that I’m always—or could ever be—successful in seeing eye to eye with the object, but this desire is kind of the driving force in my making.”
When I remark that their artistic inquiry also signals a great deal of care, they agree. “I love objects,” Downey laughs. “That’s maybe what draws me to sculpture. I want to know more about what the objects that we live with do, what they mean and how they affect us—more, if not just as much as—we affect them, from having created them, and knowing that they’re extensions of the body,” they say.
“Tell it on the Rock” features a billboard-like assemblage of white tank tops (termed “wife pleasers” in the work’s description) and skirted with a row of pink acrylic nails. It’s ghostly, the nails dangling, isolated from fingers.
“I was thinking about things that are thought to be ‘ghetto fabulous,’ which is this insult sometimes used against urban Black folks for accessing ways to feel luxurious, despite the material conditions. My grandma and many Black women that I grew up around would have these acrylic nails, and I would see them use the nails as a prosthetic that gives luxury, without having a lot of money. I think of my grandma being like ‘yeah, I can’t pick this up because of my nails,’” Downey laughs. “‘I can’t zip this or do that’, like, ‘would you please do it for me?’ and so this accessory restrained their movements, and also became a way of asking for help. The nails signaled to others that yeah, I get help to do these things—I’m not alone, I have people who serve me. I have people who care for me.”
Super Deluxe
Where: Midway Contemporary Art, 1509 Marshall St. NE, Minneapolis
When: Through January 25
Tickets: Free; find Cameron Patricia Downey here.
