Gossamers Volume I
In Gossamers: Volume I Cameron Downey’s playlist looks across a trio of moving image works made between 1929 and 2016 drawn from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection, and contextualizes them with an artist-written response riffing on ideas of ephemerality, presence, and affect in image making. This playlist is the first in the series Gossamers and is on view in the Walker's free Bentson Mediatheque, open during gallery hours.
“The viewer [of the photograph] feels an irresistible compulsion to seek the tiny spark of accident, the here and now.” – Walter Benjamin, as quoted by Moyra Davey in “Notes on Photography and Accident”
Whereas all that is available to us as it pertains to moving image is a chance at looking back, decoding, dismembering, giving governance to, and finding trust (or rupture) in one’s present moment.
Whereas in those few places set even aside for these tasks, there is but to recourse, back track, return and turn and turn again.
Gossamers: Volume I seeks these returns in a fashioning of three films pulled from the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. To imbricate the works of Sky Hopinka, Twin Cities youth and Duke Ellington for me, is to ask the kinds of questions of remembrance and fragility that only moving image can ask.
I’ll Remember You As You Were, Not as You’ll Become asks “what ephemera is left as proof of presence?”. A Day At Oxford considers what, in the words of Tyrone S Palmer, the weight is of non-existence.1 And what pierces and backflips as wholly real, even still? And lastly Black and Tan Fantasy, in chorus with those preceding, asks, “how possibly thin and snarled are the vestiges of this proof? how out of frame, how barely conscious, how in affect, how miscogged can these remains be and still manage exigence?” Tavin, Kevin M. “Six Acts of Miscognition: Implications for Art Education.” 2
This series of playlists finds its raison d'être in a meandering through, as presented in Notes on Photography & Accident, ‘that which can’t be willed’ as it pertains to the discipline of moving image; that which ‘ruptures’ and flashes only for a moment, even when said moment is a solitudinous and drifting pan across evergreen forests –as in the case of Sky Hopinka, or that which pulsates technicolor even in the amber color grade of A Day at Oxford.
1929, US, 35mm transferred to digital (black & white, sound), 19 min. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
1972, US, Super 8 transferred to digital, 3.5 min. Through the Eyes of Youth, Film in the Cities Collection, Minnesota Historical Society (1970-1980).
I’ll Remember You as You Were, Not as What You’ll Become, Sky Hopinka,
2016, US, digital, 12 min. Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Cameron Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. Seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2021); Engage Projects, Chicago (2021–2022); as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program (2022); M+B Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (2023). They are in residence with the Walker Art Center's Moving Image department from fall 2022 through spring 2023.
Major support to preserve, digitize, and present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.
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