Cameron Patricia Downey, Hoard Ecstatic
LocationT293, Rome
DateOpening January 16, 2025
T293 is pleased to present Hoard Ecstatic, the first exhibition in Italy by Cameron Patricia Downey.
Hoard Ecstatic investigates the nature of daily objects that dictate our lives and our living as much as we do theirs’. Downey’s collection of materially serial works consist of objects that are oft banal, domestic or peripheral in nature: an ironing board, a hanging rack, a hairdo. The prosthetic and the incidental are placed center stage as a way of asking what happens when the objects once compelled to serve us, are freed from their duties. Adornments gather in glamorous community and crowd around their spectres. Information about their respective parts and collective character exhumes. Ironing boards continue on through the walls and the floors. Downey’s wig works beckon a hoard of performers turned away from their audience. The clusters are ecstatic, eternal and haunting– never quite coming face to face with the viewer.
BIOGRAPHY
Cameron Patricia Downey (1998, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an anti-disciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, photography, film, body, curation and otherwise. Peering into the private lives of objects, seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, Downey’s work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and lend fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.
Downey’s work has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; 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.
Hoard Ecstatic investigates the nature of daily objects that dictate our lives and our living as much as we do theirs’. Downey’s collection of materially serial works consist of objects that are oft banal, domestic or peripheral in nature: an ironing board, a hanging rack, a hairdo. The prosthetic and the incidental are placed center stage as a way of asking what happens when the objects once compelled to serve us, are freed from their duties. Adornments gather in glamorous community and crowd around their spectres. Information about their respective parts and collective character exhumes. Ironing boards continue on through the walls and the floors. Downey’s wig works beckon a hoard of performers turned away from their audience. The clusters are ecstatic, eternal and haunting– never quite coming face to face with the viewer.
BIOGRAPHY
Cameron Patricia Downey (1998, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an anti-disciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, photography, film, body, curation and otherwise. Peering into the private lives of objects, seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, Downey’s work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and lend fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.
Downey’s work has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; 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.