Cammie Staros
DOOMSDAYERS
© Cammie Staros.
Over the last decade, Cammie Staros has investigated how Greco-Roman arti- facts came to represent a point of origin for Western art history. Her sculptures are hybrids of antiquity and modern industry, with their display format playing an essential role in their conceptual framework. She primarily engages the language of the vessel, which she warps into unconventional forms and augments with spider webs made of metal chains, neon light attachments, and floating plexiglass pedestals. Staros’s work foreshadows what might become of prized objects in the future and how they will shape the understanding of our legacy, as ceramic remnants have done for past civilizations. Fish tanks make for an unpredictable presentation case for her vessels, establishing an unfixed timeline between ancient shipwrecks and archeological ruins of a post-apocalyptic future reeling from an ecological disas- ter.
Staros manipulates the forms of the submerged vessels to exaggerate the distortion caused by their aqueous habitats. Often inhabited by fish and plants, the watery containers posit a hypo- thetical future in which museological displays have fallen into abandonment as the natural environment reclaims objects that were once organic. Her practice considers how shifting context can create new meanings and alternative narratives.
B. 1983, Nashville, TN
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
cammiestaros.com
@cammiestaros
SP1631
Cammie Staros, Net of Hephaestus, 2022, Ceramic and silver. Courtesy of the artist and Nazarian / Curcio.
SP1628
Narcissus in Love, 2022, Ceramic, acrylic, wood, laminate, powder-coated steel, water, aquatic filtration system, programmed grow light, seiryu stone. 76" (H) x 19" (W) x 19" (D). Courtesy of the artist.