Cammie Staros: Man Shall Know Nothing Of It

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”
- Georges Bataille 

François Ghebaly is pleased to present Man Shall Know Nothing of It, an exhibition of new sculpture by Cammie Staros.

Staros continues her investigation into the abstract, mutant possibilities of antiquated forms. Body-scale works in wood, brass, and ceramic both invite and repulse the viewer’s touch. Staros’s sculptures size us up, as if to envelop and devour. Meanwhile, they seem to watch us back through painted eyes—perched, for example, in a tuck of Venetian blinds.

Staros mates tropes of Modernism with the ancient forms of Greece and Egypt; the resulting double-entendre’d objects are at once coolly elegant and quietly salacious. The shapely hips of clay pots stacked into a precarious totem flaunt the voluptuous undulations of a Brancusi. An oversized pot lies semi-prostrate, propped on its handles, impassive as a reclining nude. The simple lines and circles on its sides evoke soft bodily protrusions in the language of Picasso or Miró. Where detailed narrative paintings ring fired surfaces of ancient artifacts, Staros wipes these pots into red, white, and black abstractions.

The present sculptures bear a similarly abstracted relationship to the human form. The language of bodies and of vessels overlaps; round bellies belong to clay jars, wood carvings have hands. Recalling LeWittian angles, shelves in the posture of Egyptian reliefs or wooden snakes extend to the height of a standard doorway. These uncanny sculptures push traditional dynamics between man and object until their sensual anthropomorphic shapes seem to veil a threat. They promise much, yet relinquish little—beyond echoes of a lecherous past; a dry orgy of antiquities; histories stacked and interpenetrating; bodies reduced to patterns in abstract congress.

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Cammie Staros graduated from Brown in 2006 with a BA in Art and Semiotics and from CalArts in 2011 with an MFA in Art.