In yesterday's post we looked at the exhibition "Mask. In Present-Day Art", opening next week at the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Among the other artists included in the event there will be also Cameron Jamie. Masks are considered by critics as the leitmotif of the American artist whose artworks are also on display at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice. Jamie seems indeed to be fascinated by the fact that, by hiding the self, masks allow the wearer to impersonate someone else and escape in this way from the restraints of public social expectations.
For his installation at the Arsenale Jamie was inspired by the folk tradition of the Perchten, an Alpine winter character associated with the Krampus. The artist already explored the Krampuslauf in a 2002 video in which he documented the tradition of men dressing like a half-goat, half-demon horned beast that punishes children and young women who have been naughty during the year.
"Smiling Disease" (2008) in the Arsenale features a group of grotesque carved wooden masks that the artist commissioned to an Austrian craftsman. The masks are adorned with horns and tufts of hair and fur and, while they do have some connection with tribal artefacts and ritual masks (like the ones collected by the Surrealists in the early 20th century), they are mainly meant to dehumanise the wearers, reducing them to monsters.
Jamie's installation in the Central Pavilion features instead three hand-moulded untitled glazed ceramic masks, fixed to the wall. The peculiarity of these masks in rich swirling tones achieved by repeatedly firing and glazing the material, stands in the fact that their interiors are presented outward towards the viewers who can in this way reverse the roles of protagonist and audience and feel empathy with the mask wearer while offering alternative ways of representing the projected self.
So who would you rather be, the frightening and macabre grotesque Krampus or the silent wearer of an anonymous glazed ceramic mask?
Comments