Currents 97: Cameron Martin
March 24-June 18, 2006
Saint Louis Art Museum
One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park
St. Louis, Missouri 63110
314.721.0072
Artists Lecture and Exhibition Preview
Thursday, March 23, 7:00 p.m.
Cameron Martins approach to landscape painting confronts the post-industrial condition of the planet at the beginning of the 21st century. Notes Martin, I am concerned with representations of nature and our shifting relationship to the sublime. While previously landscape may have evoked a terror of the infinite, given the worlds current environmental course, it now provides something akin to a terror of loss.
The works on view in Currents 97: Cameron Martin are made with the cultural memory of a pristine and magnificent wilderness in mind, but in Martins practice this idea is complicated both by the mediation of advertising and by the realization that the natural world is rapidly shrinking. The stagnant morass of Deilution, 2006 (the title itself a is a telling conflation of several malignant terms including devolution, dilution, and pollution), features water that no longer holds restorative or cleansing properties but is instead thick, still, and glinting with metallic residue. In The Crooked and Wide, 2003, water crystallizes into jagged fragments awash in an acid green-blue vortex. Remission, 2006, is a monumental painting based on the popular image of Mount St. Helens, a mountain that has been admired for its stately presence but revealed itself to be radically unstable with a major eruption in 1980. The title of Remission likens the landscape to a body with a dormant illness which may unexpectedly recur.
Currents 97: Cameron Martin is part of a series of exhibitions featuring the work of contemporary artists at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The series is supported by the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Endowment Fund, which supports the exhibition and acquisition of contemporary art at the Museum and the teaching principles of contemporary art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, College and Graduate School of Art at Washington University. This exhibition was curated by Robin Clark, associate curator of contemporary art.
