Cameron Kerr: Collecting the Unconscious
Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver, BC - June 20 – Aug 23
Opened in 2015, Griffin Art Projects is a space dedicated to the exhibition of private art collections. Though artworks take centre stage, it is often their curatorial approaches that have visitors buzzing. In 2016, artists Anne Low and Gareth Moore solicited prized objects from the collections of visual artists for their sprawling Kitchen Midden assemblage. For Collecting the Unconscious, Trapp Projects gallerist Patrik Andersson has curated a selection of privately held works by Vancouver-based artist Cameron Kerr that act as a Freudian id for Kerr’s more recent photographs and sculptures.
In the smaller south gallery, Andersson has mounted four of Kerr’s works from four different collections. These include Voyageur (2019), a wall-mounted magazine cover that would look like a tourist publication if the title didn’t refer to Canada’s first agents of settler colonialism; Ghost on Deck (2015), a free-standing cedar and acrylic sculpture of an unoccupied pair of overalls; a red-cedar, net-twine and plastic-net needle sculpture called Gabo’s Day Off (2010); and a photograph of an in situ abstract sculpture Kerr made
called Palmerston Main, June 17, 2021 (2023).
Dominating the north gallery is a series of large wall works. Each work consists of four separately sourced and seemingly random lens-based images printed onto canvas and laminated. After contemplating his collages, Kerr applied brush and paint to unearth from their images a unifying abstract form. On the floor of the gallery stand two of Kerr’s folding plywood sculptures, as well as two cedar carvings, one of which began as four square blocks glued together, from which the artist fashioned a form that references both the enclosed sculpture of Henry Moore and Sumerian statuary.
Opening Reception June 19, 6-8pm
