For his second solo exhibition at I-20, Louis Cameron will exhibit two series of paintings and a video that continue his work—started in 2004—in abstracting the color charts of consumer product identities.
The Color Bar paintings will comprise one group of works. There will be 3 works in this series based on color bar codes, the largest measuring 8 x 19 feet. Together the grouping references the tension between minimalism and consumer culture. These works are entitled Snickers, M&M’s Peanut and Apple & Eve, 100% Apple Juice.
The second set of paintings represents a synthesis of ideas that were involved in two previous bodies of work. The Tile paintings incorporate the physical qualities of his works that were first featured in the 2001 exhibition “Freestyle” at the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the conceptual underpinnings of his Puzzle paintings, first shown in 2005 at I-20.
The Tile paintings are composed of a pattern of rectangles to quantify the percentage of color existing in the color code for a given product. The high-relief texture of the rectangle “tiles” is created with acrylic paint. The resulting color chart is arrived at by a system of chance. These works are entitled McDonald’s Apple Pie, Hershey’s and Marlboro.
The video Heineken is less diagrammatic and more expressive than the paintings. Distortion and cropping are the means used to turn an image of a six-pack of beer into an abstraction that evokes a river of colors flowing past the frame.
Louis Cameron was born in 1973 in Columbus, Ohio. He received his BFA at the University of Southern California; an MFA at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania; and had a 2002 - 2003 residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He had solo shows in 2006 at the James Dickerson, E. Bronson Ingram Studio Art Center at Vanderbilt University, Nashville; and G Fine Art, Washington, D.C. Recent group shows include Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2007); Branded and On Display, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Champaign (2007); Collection in Context, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2006); The Dakar Biennale of Contemporary Art, Senegal (2006); Bearable Lightness…Likeness, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); Extreme Abstraction, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2005); and Open House: Working in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum of Art (2004).
