‘Barking Tar,’ ink drawings that capture the bizarre

Cameron Jamie’s solo exhibition is on display at the Bernier/Eliades gallery

A. KOROXENIDIS

‘Little Minnie,’ 2009, ink drawing

A strange world of odd rituals and unconventional behavior is the focus of Cameron Jamie’s art, itself a varied and distinctive body of work that eschews the usual classifications of contemporary art. His work has been described as akin to cultural ethnography – although without the “remote” element of the documentary approach – or as an exploration of urban folklore rituals, vernacular or fringe cultures. A Californian artist who lives in Paris, Jamie works across different media including drawings, photography, installation and performance but is mostly known for his films, a body of work that evokes the approach of cinema verite.

Yet it is the medium of drawing that Jamie describes as “the spinal cord of his work” and the foundation of his films. A wide selection of recent drawings, presented for the first time, are shown in “Barking Tar,” his engaging solo exhibition at the Bernier/Eliades gallery.

Fantastic, mask-like, fragmented creatures – half-man, half-animal – are drawn within a web of sinuous lines and layers of paint. Imbued with a pagan, mythical mood, the drawings look like the visual metaphors of hallucinations. They reveal both spontaneity and intensity. “The drawings were always fantasies, an extension of reality. The ink is a metaphor for tar. The idea is playing tricks with ink, making it ‘bark’ and roll over. These are very spontaneous drawings,” says Jamie. The drawings contain violence, but it is a violence that is more about inner turmoil, more poetic than aggressive.

As with the drawings, Jamie’s films most often focus on acts or urban, fringe rituals that contain a certain violence or a terrifying, even perverse at times, element. Most of these acts are not culturally endorsed. They are drawn from subculture but are also an evocation of more purely ritualistic behaviors.

“BB” (2000), for example, was a film about a ritual act performed by teenagers in the backyards of San Fernando Valley. Inspired by television wrestling heroes, the ritual involved throwing chairs to one another. Then came “Spook House,” which is about a Halloween custom in the working-class suburb of Detroit. and “Kranky Klaus,” which chronicles another violent pagan celebration that takes place in a region of Austria during Christmas.

Jamie’s work is not judgmental of such acts. Rather it reflects on such outlandish acts in relation to contemporary culture, the construction of identity and the expression of man’s more instinctual and suppressed drives.

His most recent film, which will premiere in January at the Rotterdam film festival, is about a “teenage gang” in Alabama who have devised a ritual act of copulating with chairs.

Raised in working-class Los Angeles, Jamie has always been fascinated with mass culture phenomena. He grew up listening to music and the radio and reading magazines, not visiting museums. He does not draw a hierarchical distinction between mass culture and high art and is even skeptical about the structures and “system” of art. “I do not feel a contemporary with contemporary artists.” For Jamie, the things that matter are those that would exist even if the art world did not.

Jamie pays tribute to the uncanny but also draws attention to unusual practices that are revealing of contemporary culture and lifestyle. The Bernier/Eliades gallery gives an insight into his eccentric approach.

“Barking Tar,” at the Bernier/Eliades gallery (11 Eptahalkou, tel 210.341.3935) to November 14.