Crap Aggregate
Kristin Cammermeyer
January 18 - March 14, 2020
@
Brittany
Vallejo, CA
"...the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies. These material powers, which can aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us, in any case call for our attentiveness, or even 'respect'...The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption."
Jane Bennett, “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things”
Kristin Cammermeyer is a multi-media artist currently based in Los Angeles. In 2013 she was Artist-in-Residence at Recology, the waste management facility in San Francisco. Since Kristin’s time there the main objective in her practice is to assist underutilized materials in transcending obsolescence by extending and redefining the use for this surplus. Cammermeyer generates video works in tandem with ephemeral installations as a device to direct her actions and further transform post-consumer waste materials. Kristin is interested in subverting one’s expectations and transforming discarded materials as a means to reconcile her concerns regarding the overabundance of waste generated within our consumer driven economy.
Kristin Cammermeyer received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has been awarded grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Harpo Foundation, and the Toby Fund. Recent exhibitions include 1708 Gallery, Richmond (2018), the Brand Library Art Gallery, Glendale (2018), I-Park Site Responsive Biennale, East Haddam (2017), Elephant Art Space, Los Angeles (2016), Klowden Mann Gallery, Los Angeles (2015). She has held residencies at the Banff Art Centre (2019), MacDowell Colony (2013), Recology SF (2013), Oxbow (2011) and Vermont Studio Center (2011). Her work is in the collections of the The Broad Foundation, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Recology SF, and the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive. An ongoing project, Be Still Life, was started by Kristin and fellow artist Anna Breininger in 2018 as an alternative form of social engagement amongst artists. Sessions are spent drawing together from a tableau collaboratively arranged. The process of connecting through drawing is not only meditative and nourishing, but also political. Be Still Life Drawing Sessions have expanded to larger audiences at venues including the 2020 Spring Break Art Show Los Angeles, 2019 Joshua Treenial and Other Places Art Fair 2019 & 2020, among others.
