A BDSM dungeon for alchemist Bitcoin investors. A druid hideaway in the abandoned Palo Alto headquarters of the corporation Theranos. A crossover between Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones where Walter White cooks meth for White Walkers. These are some of the images that Elaine's work conjures up for people.
In this case, the writer and art historian Colby Chamberlain. I like to look at Elaine's work thinking about the shifts in difference between visual prose and visual poetry. There are narratives, ideas, concepts, but there's also evocations, atmospherics, and rhythms that key you in as well. spite the notable iciness from some of the work, you can still sense a beating heart.
It's the reason I return to the work and get excited for new shows of hers. There's a feeling of the post apocalyptic, a sense of dread, there's violence and the vestiges of religion, but from the way these works come together and how each show operates, I get the sense that this is a person wrestling with belief, not someone who's already sworn it off.
And it's those struggles that I'm interested in. Why do any of us fight the fights we do? And what does it say about us?
Edited Transcript of the Talk
Ajay Kurian: I've always loved your work, and there was a specific moment in 2014, at Ramiken Crucible, where I was genuinely floored.
It was so quiet in there. It was so beautiful and eerie. The scent in the air, everything about it felt meticulous but also carefree. It wasn't overly theatrical or overdone.
And I just want to start from the beginning, because there's an arc of the visual poetry that you start making and it would be interesting for me to understand how certain things started to congeal, how certain sculptural forms started to congeal for you. This is the first show that you did at Ramekin Crucible in 2011 called “without true bazaars”. Do you even remember this show?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, it's interesting to see it. It was so long ago.
Ajay Kurian: Fourteen years.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: When I see these images, I immediately think about how I had no money, and was really just working with what I could get my hands on.
But, you know, that wasn't an obstacle at the time. It was normal. But looking back, the simplicity of what I was doing and the type of materials…I mean, it doesn't feel like student work, but because I was just out of school, I was so young, and I wasn't fully formed, it still feels transitional. But it was a such an opportunity to learn about what I was doing in public, and it could have gone
Ajay Kurian: I feel like first solo shows, it's like you have nothing to lose. So it's just like, fuck it, do what you want to do.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: And limited resources, so you can't just go crazy - you’re contained.
Ajay Kurian: What was before this? Were you in art school
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes. I'm from Canada and I grew up in Alberta. It's like the Texas of Canada, if you're not familiar. Yeah. above Montana, but I went to Art School right out of high school. It's way less of a commitment there because it's so cheap. It's not like a fraught decision. Like should I spend all this money to go to art school? It's like, try it.
Ajay Kurian: So that was a BFA program?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes, at the Alberta College of Art. They had amazing, world class facilities. So I actually learned how to do very niche metalworking. They had a glass blowing shop, ceramics; you could cast bronze there. So I got a really technical education. I was in the drawing department, and we had to go draw cadavers at the hospital. But then there were really good instructors as well where it was really their mission to teach and they were really good at making you think about what you're doing.
And then I graduated from there and I didn't really know what to do. I was working at American Apparel and the rents were getting jacked up in Calgary where the school was because there was an oil boom going on. I had to leave. So I moved back in with my dad And I turned his garage into a studio.
And I hated it there so much. It's the small city that I went to high school in. so I immediately applied to grad school in New York without knowing anything about any school in New York. I just did a quick search and I was like, okay, we're going to just apply to all of these and get out of here.
And that's how I ended up in New York. I went to NYU. I graduated in 2010.
Ajay Kurian: Okay. when did you meet Mike? Mike is the owner of Ramekin Crucible.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't know what year, probably 2010 or 11, at a party. At the Jane Hotel.
Ajay Kurian: It's so interesting to hear about those early conversations with your first gallerist because there's so much history that happens in that moment and then looking back on it retrospectively you're like wow what was that?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I think we were both learning a lot, you know? And we took a chance on each other. It sounds crazy now, like we met at a party, but that's how you used to meet people. And we had mutual friends, like Borden, Capalino. So we met at this party, and we got to talking and then a studio visit with him and Blaize (Lehane, former director at Ramiken Crucible). The building I was living in had just caught fire right before the visit. A lot was going on for me personally, but it ended up working out really well because I didn't have to pay rent for like six months, which is one of the reasons I could stay in New York. The work I was making, was similar to what I made for that first show.
I think I made this piece actually in school, that long stick thing. it's just a piece of MDF, or maybe it's actual wood. It was coated in a pouch of rolling tobacco. I think that piece was in my grad show at NYU.
Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna skip to the next show. This is the first time, you start using brass in the work. It sounds like you already had a decent understanding of, how to make almost anything based on your education. These brass leaves - did you make those yourself? Was that outsourced? How did that happen?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I made it all. Except the piece of those, cast aluminum things at the top. You can't tell what they are, but I made those with my dad in Canada.
Ajay Kurian: What are they? I remember seeing, there's been a couple of iterations of them. I remember seeing them here. I remember seeing them at an art fair where the whole booth was filled with almost like a rhythm of these, for the lack of a better word, “blanks.” Do you consider them kind of blanks or what are they made out of?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, I was kind of thinking about an ingot, which is like a cast piece of metal And a photographic plate or a blank. I used to go, I still go to the NYU library and they had amazing books from NASA there. They had this great atlas of photographs of the moon, like before they went to the moon. the photographic technique is done in scans, so it's kind of like stripes. the book is large and you can flip it.
And each page - I was kind of thinking each as sort of like a page from that book - it was like plotting something in the round into a flatness.
Ajay Kurian: Scale-wise, they’re almost like a oversized book.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, that's the reason for the scale, something that you could potentially hold. And then they're on this rail, because they don't actually hang on the wall. They're always meant to sit on something and lean. So they're like an object, they don't have a thing on the back that you can stick them on the wall.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, they feel like tablets.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah.
Ajay Kurian: Which, as you'll see as we progress, there's this sense of religiosity or ritual or the transcendental. It goes through very specific vocabularies.
This was the show that I fell in love with. This is Venus Anodyamine. These are large clamshells. Were you able to find the two halves of each of them?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I later on made a piece where I did find one whole one and then I stopped making them because I was like, I found a whole one. So no, they're just the halves.
Ajay Kurian: So, there's this long piece of brass that falls into the clamshell where a piece of paper thin mica is suspended, and then there's frankincense on top of the mica. and a flame underneath it, so you can smell frankincense throughout the room.
And it was so beautiful. I grew up religious. My parents are from South India, so Christianity is big. a lot of those scents, a lot of that ritual. just gets imparted in you. The ways that I think about space and how I move through it are defined in a lot of ways by those early forms of ritual.
And to me, it felt like that might've been the case with you too. Maybe it was more distant, but I'm really curious because there's all these moments in which I see you pulling from the, wealth of iconography in Western Christianity - symbols, and so on. Did you grow up with that?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No. I grew up in a small place, small town, and then moved to a small city. Most people around us were religious. If I slept over at a friend's house on Saturday we had to go to church. Some families were very strict, but my mom was very anti religion.
Ajay Kurian: Really?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah. Not in a discriminatory way, but she was just like, we're not having that. You're not doing that. You're not baptized. My parents weren't married until later on, like when I was a teenager. And I grew up thinking they were married because everyone else's parents were. I remember one day I asked my mom, like, Where are all the wedding pictures of you and dad? She looks at me. She's like, we're not married.
I was shocked because at eight or nine, I just assumed, you know. But I was always interested, maybe because of that and it being around me and it was something I observed. I watched people speak in tongues through this little window thing when I was a kid, so I would observe these things as an outsider.
Yeah. It really made me dig into it in a different way, I guess. But it was still around me.
Ajay Kurian: That feels like a healthier relationship. Because I had to unpack my relationship to it. But it's good if you can be a spectator of it, I think there are some things of value in terms of community and so on. It’s not like I think religion is wholesale bad. But it's nice to have some distance so you can be like, Oh, okay, this is maybe interesting. What is that connected to and what's the deeper psyche there?
And that's kind of the sense that I get from the ways in which you work. It's like you're using a symbol or mythology to interrogate something deeper. There's a show at Rodolphe Janssen next year called Medusa. So there's Venus Anodyamine, like Venus rising from the clamshell. And then the following show is called Medusa, I think it was the same year. Were you working on these bodies of workin tandem? how did they come together? Or did they feel separate in your head?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: They did. right before I did the clamshell show, I got my own studio. Previous to that I was sharing. And I realized it was driving me insane, and it was really detrimental to my work. I realized, if I'm gonna try making this work as an artist, I have to take some kind of risk and just go out on my own so I can concentrate. That's how I made those clam shell works. It was really just that I had no distractions.
I also made these alone in my studio. I made them all myself. This came out of some writing that I was doing that has nothing to do with appreciating the work. It was just a way to store some ideas that I was thinking about as a collage of different snippets of writing. It was about this theoretical weapon called the Medusa that freezes people.
And in it, this character gets lost in a kind of dream jungle. So that's how I, started making the work, but it doesn't matter to me that someone would know that.
But what you can't see in these images is in the details of these works, everything's adjustable. They’re filled with small screws - all the hardware is visible.
The curved branches are found lamp parts. Everything else I made - I made the leaves, made the hardware, the rods.
The rock is marble. The holes that are already in it are from when they blast it out of the quarry, they drill holes, put explosives in, and it cleaves like perforated paper. The holes dictated the shape of where the rods went. So it was working with that.
I traced the plant leaves off a plant that I had, and still have, a Monstera. My point is, you can see all of that in the work. it's much rougher than they look in these photos. They’re dirty, there’s sharp edges and there's a lot of flaws in them.
I wanted to do something similar to the clamshell something you could tune to some kind of message, like a kind of receiver or transmitter. And there's this idea of also packing it away, like taking everything apart. That will become more important to me.
Ajay Kurian: Of modularity?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Modularity and something that maybe could never be put back together the same way. Like, when these are shipped, they come apart, and then you could try to get it exact, but it's not really the point.
Ajay Kurian: So it's like there's a recipe that you follow, but it's not like it comes out the same way every time. There are parameters that are set and then the piece exists within those parameters, right?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: If you're imagining doing fieldwork as someone in the army, the military, or a biologist, you have to set up a camp.
We have to set up equipment. It's always going to be adapted to the scenario and the terrain.
Ajay Kurian: Is there something you're looking for in terms of how it responds to site?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, just that it doesn't look wrong. Everyone has a sense of beauty. I also want it to look like it wasn't just thrown together, so it kind of asks a lot of someone putting it together if I'm not there. But I like that. Not to demand a lot, but that it's like — what do you think looks good? Like when you buy some flowers and they put them in the vase, you arrange them how you want them.
Ajay Kurian: That's interesting. I know that different artists have different levels of meticulousness when it comes to installation instructions.
For instance Josh Kline has books for his installations. Every single thing is spelled out, like how a part is replaced or how everything needs to interact. So that it can be done exactly the same way. This is a level of freedom where if you're not around and a hundred years from now, if this piece is being put together and there's no parameters and someone thinks putting all of them at the bottom and all of them at the top is awesome — is that still the piece?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Well, there is a built in fail safe thing. The rods are graduated and there's two sizes of sliding hardware. So here's a limit. They can't all be at the top. So it's kind of within reason.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I am very picky and particular, but I'm really bad at administrative stuff. There are loose guidelines for these things and they get numbered so it's not a total free for all.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. The title is, ‘so whatever impressions this unconscious inference leads to, they strike "our consciousness as a foreign and overpowering force of nature”’. That last part is a quotation. I'm sure you can't remember where that's from, but is it part of the story?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Lots of the titles in my work come from my writing so that would be from that.
Ajay Kurian: This one almost feels more narratively driven. I can follow the pacing of it and understand where it's going. The titles that continue are slightly more abstract and there's no punctuation usually. That means the beginnings and endings of thoughts blur together and there's a moment where you take that mental pause and say, this is where I'm going to bracket that part of it and try to make sense of that.
Ajay Kurian: After the Venus show, did this give you the sense that, okay, now I know some of the things that I'm working with. Because initially from those first shows that we see, there's a spareness, there's a specificity with materials. There's something about towers or maybe the body that feels like it's playing a role but then there’s a shift. There's a different organicism and a realm in which we're now in. Could you feel that coming together in that moment?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, I did feel like I was oh, this is the artist that I am or the start of it, you know? That's an amazing feeling. That show felt so good. I think you picked up on it, because you were like, this seems different. It did come out of me getting my own studio and I actually quit my job the day after the second show at Ramekin that you showed. So I had time and space, and I made a show that caught me up to where I wanted to be. It felt like I was not done with what I was doing, but I was like, okay, this feels like the most realized show that I've made so far, which is still 10 years ago.
Ajay Kurian: I felt like, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there was a Canadian contingency that came to New York at one time. Was that real or made up? Did it just so happen that you guys were Canadian? Or did you guys know each other?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's our secret shame. Well, I was the only person in that group that you're referring to I think. Maybe there's one other guy from Alberta. Most people were from either Vancouver or Toronto area, and maybe one or two from Montreal. But somehow we were just all attracted to each other and ended up at parties. It's like, you're Canadian, you're Canadian, you're Canadian. Then we just hung out for a few years. I'm still friends with lots of them.
Ajay Kurian: That's wild. I just assumed we all emigrated together.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I met them here. It’s weird.
Ajay Kurian: It’s really blowing my mind. This entire time I thought, they met and then they were like, let’s take over New York. But that's not it at all. Interesting.
Let's go to the show Hannah Hoffman, this is probably another favorite show of mine.
Where I think a lot of other concerns kind of come to the fore. I'm just going to cycle through some of these images so you guys can see the show. The title of the show, ‘when waveform walks the earth’.
Can I tell you my interpretation of that? I was thinking about the instantiation of Christ, like God becoming a body. There was something about it that felt similar, where it was like, there's a choice that's made, and it becomes a wave, and it's here in the world. Before that, it's potential and it's something that doesn't exist, it's not with us in the world. And then as soon as that choice is made, it's like a thing in the world. Does that at all resonate?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, you got it, that’s a very good way of putting it. I wrote something again for this show that was the press release. It deals with the things you were talking about, like mirror imaging and wave being like a bell that can't be unrung and marching in step. Like a bunch of people creating a vibration, marching like an army that shakes apart this bridge to the world.
I write a lot for myself, without intention. When I do show it, it's always like a draft. I'm never like, this is a genius piece of writing. 'm just kind of like, these are some thoughts. But I started writing in this style of more in reference to the titles, without punctuation or as much, weird capitalization and abbreviations.
I would run things sometimes through a translator and back to English. Multiple times, multiple different languages and sections and then collage things together. I started to try to not talk in my voice. Try to get out of a narrative in that sense.
I feel like this is the first time where, there's an actual cast of a body. I think beyond that, it's the garments of the body, and the residue of the body, or something that might suggest it, but isn't it.
Ajay Kurian: There's so much about this that feels connected to religion, sexuality, violence and the larger structures that govern us. It was something written about your work where they say that but I don't remember how they phrase it.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: That idea came a little later from outside.
Ajay Kurian: How does an external idea like that resonate with you? Does it feel like this is just now the common interpretation of my work and it's approximate, or does it feel like, oh, I'm being seen?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: In that instance, it felt correct. Like I was being seen a little more because I was an emerging artist. People don't want to make proclamations or it's hard to tell what someone's actually doing and maybe it still is. But sometimes it was like I was getting placed in beautiful things or fashion, which I love but that has nothing to do with anything else. It is very bankrupt to think that way.
But I think it started kind of around this time. I mean, there's a literal gas mask in this show and that rubber jacket is an old policemen's overcoat maybe from the fifties or sixties. For me, a gas mask instantly evokes war and high altitude flight.
It's an ongoing series with parachutes from world war two that were used in the war, and there’s an animal, like one singular animal hide around this laboratory. It's called a lattice. They use it in chem labs to put hardware on with beakers and stuff. I think having something with an aura like that, from World War II, you can't really ignore the message anymore.
Ajay Kurian: I mean, it really tries, because it is such a beautiful object. There's something so ecstatic about it. I remember reading that somebody was making a connection to Bernini and the kind of ecstasy in one of his pieces, how it was almost too sexual and that felt kind of right.
Even though it's still kind of pared down, the sexuality of it is also related to the BDSM vibe of it, but it's such an overflow. The folds just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. That bodily intonation comes first and then it's kind of a brainfuck afterwards to think it's a World War II parachute, and I still don't have any reconciliation for it.
There's a lot of pieces, a lot of things that I can say what the parts are, but it doesn't give me a sense of what the whole is. The whole is much bigger than the parts. To me, that's essentially a successful artwork. If the whole is more than the parts and it doesn't resolve into a conceptual strategy.
It's not like, this is her take on violence and sexuality and war. they happen to be with one another and you have to figure out how that feels to you. It's not really about the sculpture when you address those feelings either. It was an interesting thing to play out when I was looking at the work and when I was sitting with it.
It was like, this is clearly more about me than the work. The work is very separate and it has a self contained quality. I can't help but think of the spectatorship of how you're seeing religion take place. You're seeing someone speak in tongues. Your ability to observe and make in a self contained way feels like part of that process.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: There's no question there. I was thinking of the word perverted while you were talking. That is the right word. It's kind of perverse to take something so serious as a World War II artifact that someone used, jumped out of a plane and make it into something that looks like a drapery. It's a little blasphemous, and blasphemy is perverted usually, right?
You saying that as an observer and I've always felt like that. I'm always kind of feel like I'm watching something unfold. How you felt as the audience member, I kind of feel like that myself, a little alienated, but not disconnected, my grandfather fought in World War II, for example.
But there's something about, watching them have PTSD and, watching the effects of things on people. Growing up with that, I think it definitely has given me, that natural disposition to almost be, in some ways, we’re like an audience.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah I mean, sometimes it comes naturally to artists and then for others you really have to cultivate that in order to become your best critic. Cause if you're so deep in your work and you just love everything that you do and you can't find distance from it, you can kind of tell when an artist is there. You can tell, like you need some alienation from yourself.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: You need to hate yourself a little more.
Ajay Kurian: It's just so you can be an observer of yourself, like how you said.
I think it's really hard.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's not impossible to be an observer, but objectivity and subjectivity is something I'm really interested in. Obviously, a lot of people are, but in terms of science some kind of neutral position that no one can have, which comes with some kind of authority that is fraudulent.
If you think of God, it’s like this ultimate omnipotent and omnipresent being, an observer or a steward without judgment, but that's not really the case. There's morality in all religions, and in science a sort of the quest for truth in different methods of inquiry.
Ajay Kurian: It's interesting that you bring up God in that regard, because it's a viewpoint from everywhere and nowhere. There is no subject, there is no object, there is no observation, it just, it's all. That's sort of a transcendental that has almost no bearing on what our operations are.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like psychedelic. It doesn't make any sense.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. It's like an impossible thing to understand.
But I feel like that divide or that inquiry into science and art as both methods of inquiry felt really profound in your Storm King installation. From what I remember, it's a cage for motorcyclists?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: There's a couple of families that own these cages and it's like a family business that they travel with. So we kind of just copied a pared down version and there's a trap door. It's about 20 feet tall 20 feet wide.
Ajay Kurian: Then on the side, the kind of pairing of objects here, that's a military bunker, correct? That's been turned upside down?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like a communication station that fits in the back of a pickup truck. So it's a mobile unit. Then we dug a little hole so it could sit at a tilt like it was looking up at the sphere. It looks tiny, but that's human size, so if you walk up to it it feels like you could open the door and go in. Inside there's all these dials and screens and stuff.
Ajay Kurian: Can you see that from like looking through the window of anything or is it completely sealed off?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It was too dangerous to have people go in there.
Ajay Kurian: Oh, for sure. I totally understand that. I think I like it more this way.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: A mystery.
Ajay Kurian: This piece like sums up a lot. It's really hard to make good public art. It has to weather the elements, it has to weather anybody who's trying to destroy it, which Americans love to destroy public art.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: People climbed this.
Ajay Kurian: I guarantee, they'll try to do anything they can to it. I'm sure people tried to flip that, structure. They'll do whatever which is another thing altogether.
There's something about this celestial sphere that feels almost platonic, even though it is just wrought steel next to this object for observation. It feels very human and human scale. You can enter it and it has all the accoutrements of a human made thing it feels more like an object because it's been flung down it's upside down and it's in this pit it is anthropomorphized looking at the sphere that combination feels like it spells out a lot of concerns that happen in multiple bodies of work.
Do you feel like having the limitations of it being an outdoor work streamlined how you were thinking about how things could be done?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes. It's actually interesting seeing my older work, which I haven't looked at in a long time now. Thinking about that brass cage thing, that was an elongated birdcage.
At that time, I had been making work using bird shit. Like parrots shitting on a moon landing newspaper. I found someone that had parrots. I was interested in cages and what we just talked about with being, feeling like an observer and thinking about my audience.
I think about audience all the time because I'm part of it, you know, this was pared down in a similar way in terms of that brass thing. I don't know how to explain it now 'cause I'm just realizing it, but there's something that connects that for me.
Ajay Kurian: It's a great project. This was 2018, I think.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't remember.
Ajay Kurian: I feel confident.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I'm really bad with dates and how things go in time. Pre pandemic for sure.
Ajay Kurian: There's something I wanted to bring up before, like the idea of narration and a story. I think there’s characters that appear in different ways that are kind of always represented through clothing or a garment. So it'll be a trench coat or, a cowboy, or the leather jacket, the kind of punk leather jacket. I think it's been sort of codified, there’s the dandy, the cowboy, and the punk in your work. Do you see those as actual characters that populate the work? Are they part of the stories that you're making in these exhibitions?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes and no. Not in so much as I'm imagining a character and what they would do.
Ajay Kurian: Is it an embodiment?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like a trope. The dandy character I've always been very fascinated by just because of some of my favorite poetry and literature. Like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, those kinds of guys. I like this idea of being a flaneur, kind of like window shopping but it being a subversive position to take. Now when we call someone a dandy, it's doesn't have the same, I mean, maybe it does in a way.
Ajay Kurian: It feels more frivolous now. Like when you use the word dandy, I feel like it doesn't have as much subversion. It's more like, oh, they have the freedom to do whatever.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Right, which is not the original thing. So you said dandy, cowboy, and punk, right? For this show, that got picked out because of the signifiers you just said, like the accoutrement and the uniforms of those types. But the only literal uniform in the show is military uniforms. Those leather jackets are all horse leather that are stuffed inside one another, but there's no military person in that cosmology of characters.
Ajay Kurian: That's true.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: So I was thinking of uniforms in a way that is fashion, but not simply fashion and not only fashion. Like how commodifying like this piece says, my life, my way.
Ajay Kurian: So kind of like commodifying some idea of rebellion. I think all of those characters kind of have that. Maybe what connects all of them is a rebellious sort of outside of a subculture figure, and that it's purchasable.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I mean, it also literally is purchasable, and I'm aware of that. I'm not pretending it's not for sale. I'm not cynical and I don't want to be like art shouldn't be for sale. I more want to implicate myself in this, maybe become less of an observer for the first time.
And maybe I'm the clown, I don't know. But I am commodifying myself in a way. You know, my life, my way. It's not your life, your way that I'm talking about. I am really talking about myself in this work for the first time, I think, in that way. But it's also referencing other experiences of that.
Ajay Kurian: It felt personally driven and then I also couldn't help but think of it as a character because there's like a snottiness to saying like my life my way, and I think just like with the font and the way that it exists It's not fully serious. It's like you're poking fun at it too.
I think the thing I maybe want to end on is asking you about the difference between being a conduit for work that gets made — how you think about critique because like critique is taking a step back and conduit is just being. I see both of those things in your work. I see like there's a sense of channeling something but then there's also very clear moments where the narration here is is self conscious. I have to be careful about what I put on you as the maker, it's not like this is autobiographical, but it's also not, not autobiographical. Conduit and critique, how do those things sit with you?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's a complex question, but I think I always feel like I am opposed to things. So I always feel like, without cynicism, that I have a natural inclination to critique. But as an artist, I don't want to simplify my position to just critiquing, because then you imply this moral cleanliness that is not interesting to me.
Complexity and self awareness in your implication in the things that you don't like is like, you know, so both I think is my goal. It might be too and then you become like a mystic sage.
Ajay Kurian: It's too much.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, but if you just critique then you might become a hypocrite because you can't just stay. You know what I mean?
Ajay Kurian: In a sense it's the worst kind of observer. You don't stand outside of this. there's a fair space to critique, and artworks do it constantly, yours as well. But if the critique is so clean and high and mighty, where it doesn't apply to me, it might not be the richest space for an artwork. It might be rich for writing and thinking about a particular idea or history, but for art it feels messier.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, but I think to be purely in one category of conduit or critique is really, really hard and why would you want to be? In either one you are kind of missing out on what the other one can bring to it. And I don't think it's weakening critique either or being a conduit to overlap those things, you know?
There's a lot of really complicated, messy people that critique things and are seen as absolute conduits. Like William Blake, who you mentioned.
Ajay Kurian: Blake is a great example.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't think you have to choose one or the other.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I also think your route sort of chooses you in a way. We were talking about this in the studio, it's not like you read someone's biography to map out who they are, but there is a resonance of a person that feels available when you look at someone's work with your work, there's a distance and a curiosity and a skepticism, but you want to go in, It's not like you're fully on the outside.
It's funny. That's like how I felt the first time I had any interaction with anything about you was that newspaper with the bird shit on it, which was the piece you had in Puerto Rico. I'd never met you, but I'd heard about you and I'd seen some of your work. And they're putting all this stuff in the cave. This cave was insane. Rose Marcus was in that show too. It was the actual newspaper of the moon landing and it was covered in bird shit. I was like, oh my god. It goes back to blasphemy. It goes back to like a perversion there. Where it was something like going to the stars.
And it was the most like base thing that you could put on it and that was the only thing that you had it was just like a newspaper that got sent to Puerto Rico.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: They gave it back to me. It was in like a little case.
Ajay Kurian: They just put it on a rock and I was like who is this person. While I try to find that photo, if you guys have questions, if you have anything that you want to ask Elaine, this is a good moment.
Audience Member 1: Yeah, I have a question. Elaine, I've loved your work for so long, like I learned it on Tumblr when I was in art school. I was gonna ask you about your relationship to the ready made, like Aja was talking about. I feel like I'm influenced by this idea of the religiosity of these things where they're held in reverence.
But I'm now thinking about the idea of the ruin, you know, where it's like there are these things like a lot of these ready made aspects in your work that are like relics or something, I thought it was kind of like interesting what you're saying.
This idea of the flaneur or something where they're not really fully participating in conspicuous consumption, but they're a witness to all of this. So, I don't know if that's a question.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, we didn't talk about the ready made, and I think it's exactly what you said, there is an aura with things, and I like things that are used in my whole life. All my clothes, my furniture, everything I own is used basically, cause I like the patina of use and then it being decommissioned. I mean, that doesn't apply to clothes if I wear them, but I'm talking about my work right now, repurposing them and giving them a new function or just ending their function and and that absence is maybe related to absence of the body.
It's like the job that this thing is supposed to do. I think that implies repurposing and change. It’s a common, theme in apocalyptic sci fi where steampunk, retro, Mad Max, like retrofitted things that aren't supposed to make something out of nothing or make do.
I'm naturally inclined to do that. It has to do with all the reasons you said, but it's also just a natural position. Like I grew up with my dad who made a lot of stuff and my parents and the way we had an income was they owned this greenhouse, they grew plants and they built the structures themselves. We went sold some at the farmer's market and my dad had like a junkyard. where he would just get scrap and it was like old washing machines and he'd cut them apart and make little like robot things. He was a farm guy but he was always making stuff so there was always junk around. I’m like a junk fan.
I think also observing it as a kid and being like what the fuck is this thing for not understanding it but like just being attracted to it I don't know if that answers what you said.
Audience Member 1: No, I totally agree with you. more times people touch something, I think you infuse it…
Elaine Cameron-Weir: …With power or something. Yeah. Magic. And it has a history in the world already outside of me. My dad made those lenses in the middle. he doesn't consider himself an artist, but he's making these homemade lenses to make a telescope. The glass is from the abandoned Prairie house that he grew up in. It's like the windows that he melted down. It's so poetic, but he just was like, that's the cheapest glass and it was around so I used it. And these ones didn't work out, so he gave them to me for the show at JTT.
Audience Member 2: In terms of representing things that are relics or degraded, does that harken back to the cadaver that you drew in art school, and do you still have a relationship to drawing?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I think it's interesting. Maybe does go back to the cadaver, or certainly death, or being put to rest, or no longer useful. The idea of art having to have a use, like it's always something on my mind, like what defines art for some people is that it's useless, you know, or, do we demand our art to be a productive member of society and have a job or whatever. Did that answer your question?
Audience Member 2: Yes, but the second part was, do you still have a drawing practice when it comes to planning and building these forms?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Weirdly, no. I don't really draw at all anymore. I make a lot outside of stuff here and there, occasionally I'll get help in my studio, but I make a lot of stuff myself wherever I can because I like the control. But I don't draw, really.
Ajay Kurian: Do you, sketch out sculptures at all?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No.
Audience Member 2: Do you make smaller facsimiles, or do you just work with the raw material?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I can picture it in my head, so I don't. I'll sometimes have to write down measurements, so I can trace something. If I want to make it symmetrical, but I don't draw.
Ajay Kurian: That's wild. It's wild that you can just visualize and start making.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Mostly. I mean, I'll write stuff down or a list of the materials which kind of remind myself, and sometimes, yes, I will draw a little squiggly thing, but I don't start with drawing.
Audience Member 3: So what does the writing software mean to you? Is it a very personal recording of a journey kind of thing? Is it like a journal? Or is this like a book that you want to write that's completely private to you?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It depends, it's very private and it’s not like a confessional thing. It’s highly edited. It's meant to seem like maybe it's just like stream of consciousness or like a jumble, but it's very particular.
I have pages and pages of Google Doc, which is kind of like a journal, because I can go back through it and kind of remember the time period and then it helps in a way confirm my own. Like is this thing I'm thinking about now totally out of the blue or crazy? I pick from it to put the occasional thing out in the world, and I also keep it very personal.
Audience Member 3: Would you ever show it?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I made a book for this show in Germany, in Dortmund, where I put out a long piece of writing. I'll leave this on the table after, so if people want to page through just be delicate, please. This is my personal copy. And I have a PDF of it, if anyone's actually interested in it.
Ajay Kurian: If you are interested, you can write the NewCrits account and we'll send it. I just want to thank Elaine again for coming out tonight in the freezing cold. Even though she doesn't like public speaking, this was great. I really appreciate it. So, thanks Elaine.
There's probably still wine and some snacks. If you guys want to hang out, feel free to hang out for a little bit. Thanks for coming!
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Thanks for coming!
Share this post