JAMES HARRIS GALLERY

Cameron Martin
“Tripartite”

April 6 to May 11, 2024

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition by New York based artist Cameron Martin. This show will mark the artist’s first exhibition at our new gallery in Dallas. In his new work, Martin explores the core tenets of his practice concerning image creation by merging the signs of painting and print technology into current generative roles for abstraction. The vibrancy of these works allows for an embodied viewing experience, calling attention to perceptual interplay and the dynamism of rhythmic compositions that seem to reverberate out of pictorial space. Entitled “Tripartite”, the exhibition will include painting, collaged works on paper and ceramic sculpture.

Martin’s paintings beautifully elucidate tensions between technical control and artistic impulse. His compositions employ grand gestures as well as calligraphic line to anchor his paintings into the history of the medium. While all the works are in fact handmade, the graphic nature of his process appears to remove any trace of the maker’s hand. His conceptualized abstractions reference both contemporary
digital interfaces and design, as well as post-war artistic outcomes of the 1960s and 1970s. In the painting “Morpheme”, purple-hued swooping forms evoke highways, films strips or ribbons. They float above a system of off-kilter grids, holes and patterns, imbuing the painting with the possibility of being mechanically produced. Through closer inspection one can see that the artist has purposely offsets the
underlaying patterning to recall misalignments of registration in a printed image. These intentional irregularities in the paint application further blur the line between mechanical and more subjective strategies often associated with abstract painting.

Also on view are framed collages that elucidates Martin’s thinking process. The elements of each work are composed according to a syntax driven by something largely felt, or initiated by and guided within intuition. Plaids, stripes and dotted patterns of paper are overlaid and skewed to create a language out of
shapes and implied motion. Most of the action in these works occurs in the top two thirds of the white sheet of paper. Line as a varied gesture comes into play here too; in some, straight lines of cut colored paper act as a division or demarcation; in others, a squiggly line feels more like a doodle, or perhaps a signature.

Constructed by rolling out and then cutting slabs of clay into irregular shapes, Martin’s ceramic sculpture turn the vocabulary of his paintings and collages into three dimensions. Once rolled, the geometric slab is coiled to stand upright. Its curved surface is glazed with solid saturated color and activated with shapes and various motifs reminiscent of the paintings. Circles and dots predominate the forms along with arabesque lines and repeating patterns. In these small-scale sculptures, Martin has reduced his visual language, creating succinct gestures.

The three types of work on view demonstrates Martin’s command of his visual language and his ability to shift it across disparate materials. Taken together, the three distinct media complement each other, producing a polyvalent vernacular of form and color.

Martin received his BA from Brown University and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. His work is currently on view in the show “50 Paintings” at the Milwaukee Art Museum. He has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), and Tel Aviv Museum. His work is in the collections of
the Whitney Museum, New York; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; and Saint Louis Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Portland Art Museum, among others. Martin is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2010), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2008), and the Artists at Giverny Fellowship and Residency (2001).

James Harris Gallery
4829 Gretna St #102
Dallas, TX 75220
214.272.8427

gallery hours. wednesday—saturday // 11:30am to 5:30pm.

jamesharrisgallery.com