Cameron Kerr at Griffin Art Projects
Griffin Art Projects is one of my favourite exhibition spaces in Vancouver, primarily because they offer great guided exhibition tours. I cannot express to you how much I love this sort of thing. You mean that someone else will do all the research, consult with the curator, email the artists, distill the information down to its most salient points, and spoon-feed it to me free of charge? I am sat.
Griffin also benefits from a unique raison d’etre; it’s a non-profit founded by a pair of West Van collectors to “share private collections with the public.” Collecting is itself a distinguished vocation-I actually consider it a calling-and it deserves respect, especially in a world where more and more people pump their money into Birkins and medi-spas and excessively-photographed vacations. After all, without collectors, there’s no art. Don’t @ me.
So for all these reasons and more, I swung by to tour Griffin’s current exhibition, Cameron Kerr: Collecting the Unconscious ( clever, no?). The show consists of a selection of Kerr’s older work, drawn from local collections, and a new body of work that is, quietly, for sale. It’s unusual for Griffin to show work that available for purchase, but then again Kerr is not formally represented by a commercial gallery. His choice, I’d assume-he has a respectable CV-but still. I can’t recall seeing an institutional show by an artist without gallery representation…maybe ever?
Kerr grew up on Vancouver Island in a town called Campbell River, the (self-proclaimed) salmon capital of the world and a major commercial fishing hub. Although the artist has studied and exhibited extensively abroad, much of his work feels native to the Pacific Slope, informed as it is by Kerr’s interest in surrealism. Capital “S” Surrealism, obviously-references to Man Ray and Dali abound-but also lowercase “s” surrealism. For whatever reason (and, for the record, there are many) the Pacific Northwest teems with a particular kind of dark surrealism; it’s thick as smoke out here. Twin Peaks, Lawrence Paul Yuxwelupton, the severed feet of the Salish Sea-it all flows from the same wellspring. So, in that sense, Kerr works within a well-established local tradition.
Get West Vancouver Moms Club’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The first room in the gallery features his earlier and more accessible work, as sort of a primer on what’s to come. This is where you’ll find:
- “ Ghost on Deck,” a life-sized sculpture of fishing waders standing upright, boots and all, as if filled out by an invisible man. The piece was inspired by a story from Kerr’s stint as a commercial fisherman, when a crewmate confided he had seen a ghost the night before, dancing, on the deck of their vessel.
- A photograph of of a tree stump, in situ, roots plugged firmly into the soil, which the artist has carved into an intricate, twisted sculpture. Is the tree alive or dead? It’s impossible to tell. In a way, it’s Schrödinger’s stump-alive and dead at the same time, much like the aforementioned ghost on deck.
- Another photograph, this time of a carved whale vertebrae displayed on a plinth. Back when Kerr was just starting out in commercial fishery, a whale swam right up alongside his boat-like something out of Moby Dick- and a senior waterman told him to cut out a chunk for their supper; Kerr didn’t know whether the request was genuine or a joke. The tension of this moment-and of his inability to distinsguish reality from fanciful suggestion-literally haunted his dreams for years thereafter.
- A small wooden sculpture of the artist’s grandfather entitled “John,” which is my hands-down favourite piece in the whole show. After carving the figurine of local cedar, Kerr printed out photographs of his grandfather and affixed them, very roughly, to the sculpture. Wide swathes of wood are visible, the man’s aged face looks soft and blurry and, and most strikingly, the whole crown of his head is laid bare. It looks, somehow, just like the memory you have of your own grandfather, and so is inexpressibly tender and sad to behold.
This collection, which explores a number of classic surrealist conceits (memory, dreamscapes, the unconscious mind), serves as a physical gateway to Kerr’s current work, which can be viewed in the next two galleries. This new oeuvre consists of a series of wall-mountedcollages and free-standingplywoodsculpturalworks. Both the collages and sculpture are outfitted with photographs sourced from old National Geographic magazines-lots of disembodied eyes, fish, roadways, and rock formations. Most of the images date back to the 1930s, so even the colour photos feel strange and flattened. The space buzzes with kinetic energy. It’s hard to know where to look.
Through his choice of photographs, Kerr pares the natural world down to a set of repeating shapes and motifs. I cannot say whether the intent is to make the familiar strange or to make the strange familiar, but either way it’s pretty successful. The sculpture in particular defies easy classification. In size and shape, it feels humanoid or maybe avian-like a flamingo or ostrich or some other spindly, sharp-jointed bird-but the rough plywood frame refers directly to the artist’s labour. You can’t help but think that these pieces would be hard to display in “real life,” i.e. outside the gallery. In theory, the sculptures can be folded up and leaned against the wall, but then you’re flattening out the richness of a three-dimensional work. To really experience the sculpture, you have to see every angle, every plane, every single nook and cranny.
Kerr’s earlier pieces had an easy narrative flow to them; he incorporated literal story-telling and biographical tidbits to help the viewer access his work. But his new compositions? There’s nothing easy about them. They’re bolder, weirder and willfully opaque. Less user-friendly. Less…salable.
As mentioned before, Kerr works outside the gallery industrial complex. As an independent, mid-career artist, he has the privilege of delving into the work without worrying as much about where or how it lands. And with this hard-earned freedom, he’s able to take a good, hard look at the weirdness underpinning our lives and create work that reflects that. Work that is hard to display and hard to understand-hard, I’d imagine, to collect -that actually captures the essence of surrealism.
So Cameron Kerr: Collecting the Unconscious invites the question: what do you prefer? The artist’s earlier work, imbued with warmth and depth and biographical detail, or his later offerings, which are unapologetically enigmatic and intellectually rigorous. What do you respect? What would you want to live with? What kind of art feels meaningful to you?
And as for me? Well, you can probably guess. I’ve always been a sucker for constructed narrative.
Want to read more? Join the club! Subscribe to West Vancouver Mom’s Club on Substack.
Yes, guys — it’s free.
