Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.
Cammie Staros’ Sunken City featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24 reinvents our relationships to the traditional historical narrative. Referencing antiquities against the expansiveness of time, Staros positions iconic relics as vessels with which to unite history and the present moment. Her aquarium virtines, which house seemingly anthropomorphic vases, are manifested as self-sustaining biomes aptly referencing the nuances of the lifetime. Staros’ exhibition uniquely encapsulates the passage of time, while simultaneously illuminating the role of the object in the context of human systems. Her modernization, yet simultaneous preservation, of the iconic relic speaks to the primal instinctual basis of a commodity-driven culture and the modern conceptualization of value.
Sunken City is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.
Mia Milosevic: I wanted to start off with just talking about how you began engaging in the work that you do. I feel like it deviates from the way other people approach art.
Cammie Staros: Yeah, it deviates from the way I used to approach art. It took me a comically long time to realize that art history is most compelling to me and most related to the reasons I got into making art in the first place. I started looking at Greco-Roman antiquities once I had started to deal with art history as an origin story of Western art history. They're just so iconic. I’m often attracted to things that are very, very iconic and I feel are already omnipresent. I actually think there's room to do new things and find new avenues when there's a little bit of a shared vocabulary, which comes with those iconic images.
MM: The concept of reinventing already iconic imagery is so interesting.
CS: I'm really interested in conventions of all kinds, you know? I think that comes into the work, like doing conventions of exhibition design and museum display, for example. Or these different kinds of languages that we pick up on often without being very conscious of it. But, that comes from a familiarity which happens once things are iconic or conventional or systematized. Some of it feels like you can get farther because there's already a little bit of a shared language, but also just acknowledging that there is this shared language is interesting to me because it goes unnoticed so often. I feel like there are these moments for humor and insight and finding new things.
MM: I feel like Greco-Roman sculpture in particular is seen as the backbone of art historical narratives. It seems like people really gravitate towards your work so much for that reason.
CS: It is. I just saw a film on the flight here [to Savannah, Georgia] actually, with a scene I didn't expect, of a teacher taking his unwilling student through a Greek wing of the MFA museum and the student being bored of seeing these Athenian black figure vases. I feel like it's very much in line with it being seen as a backbone of art history and especially Western art history. It's dusty and old, and I think that when things feel sort of tired, it's exactly the right time to resuscitate them.
MM: You add these modern elements, like the spiderwebs, as facets of your sculpture. Some reviews of your work describe the spiderwebs as representations of the decay of value in human societies, which I feel is an interesting way to put it.
CS: And they're made out of jewelry material. There's this precious object version of the corrosion of the natural world into our controlled, human spaces. There are signs of decay, there are signs of life, and the repurposing of quote unquote “our objects.” That happens all around us all of the time. I also just see spiders in my studio all the time.
MM: The spiderwebs jumped out at me a lot because it summarizes your work, in a way. There’s this idea of the old becoming new.
CS: I think all of it is sort of a way of thinking about things. It's like an elegant solution to the dusty cobweb of history. And I think about things like contradiction in nature a lot too. I feel like that's all relevant and wrapped up together.
Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.
MM: You talk a lot about time in reference to your work. Can you elaborate on what time means to your work or how you think of it?
CS: Part of my other motivation behind referencing antiquities is a way to fathom the unfathomable expansiveness of time. I think it's so hard to put our lives in proportion. I can't speak for other people, but for myself, I think it's fairly imagined to think of things in terms of lifespan or lifetime, and it's so hard to think beyond that. Dealing with references that are 2,500 years old is a way to sort of picture that expansive time and project it forward to imagine what things today might look like when they are relics. I also like introducing stone into my practice, I think it adds not only reference to historical time on top of a lifetime, but also geological time. So you're going from a couple of thousand to a few million years old. That's just something I feel like I'm often trying to wrap my own head around, which is why it continues to be of interest.
MM: You mentioned that adding figuration to your sculpture is new.
CS: I definitely spent a long time avoiding it, and part of that is because I really think of the pieces themselves as subjects. I think that referencing the body without making figurative work is impactful. I've pierced the flesh of pots before, I’ve done a sort of patterning that feels like tattooing or clothing, but still not figurative with a capital F. My work has been bodily for a really long time, but it just felt time to move into those explicit depictions of the figure. I think part of it is that the vessels themselves had gotten so distorted from the original forms that it felt like painting those figures would exaggerate that distortion and really work with it, as opposed to feeling like a distraction from the form. It’s a brain teaser every time, and that feels healthy.
MM: Can you tell me a little bit more about the aquarium pieces?
CS: The aquariums are really set up to look like museums of antiquities that have been flooded and filled with life. I’m thinking about these pieces as sort of fruits of fallen empires, as prescient objects recognizing ourselves, history, and the cyclical nature of society. I’m really thinking about how these empires are full of incredible achievements and also sort of symbolic of the hubris of man. I think those pieces bring all of those ideas to the fore and also do this sort of straddling—referencing different times of the ancient past, its contemporary display, and then positing a version of what the future of today's objects might look like.
MM: And then there's the reflective aspect too.
CS: In the first ones I did, the ceramics were kind of asymmetrical and became almost zoomorphic in shape. It felt like they were adapting to their watery habitats. I really liked the idea of making the works feel like they had changed in this watery context, and so I thought about the ways that water distorts objects. I really wanted to make that distortion very central. So these are set up like they're a tank with a sort of straight vase and then another inverted, wobbly vase as if it's a reflection of its righted twin.
MM: The aquarium vitrine that you see right when you walk in, Narcissus in Love, aligns perfectly with what you just described.
CS: I mean, I couldn't not reference Narcissus if I was making a sculpture of watery reflection. I was thinking a lot about so-called encyclopedic museums, but also natural history museums with aquarium vitrines and shell pots. I've done a lot of titles that are Latin following a taxonomic structure as if they’re objects that might be found in a natural history museum, but they're funky versions, you know?
MM: You said something about hubris being a component of your work. That's an interesting idea in relation to Roman sculpture and especially with the story of Narcissus. I'm sure you have a story behind that…do you?
CS: I mean, the history of mankind. There's all of these poetic parallels to Greek mythology, history, and language. So many of those stories are also allegorical for human behavior and different flavors of hubris. The story of Narcissus—he was beloved by all and loved nobody, and then went into a forest glade and saw a boy in a pond and immediately fell in love with his own reflection and refused to move until he eventually died staring at his reflection. That sort of navel-gazing aspect is definitely there. And, not to get too dark, but the things we do to our own detriment are there too.
Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.