Saturday, November 2, 6 – 8pm

Super Deluxe circles and jaunts around codes of luxury, pleasure, service and gameplay by a jostling of material, personal recollection, flavor and motion itself. In a sociopolitical context wherein the concept of wealth has footed itself entirely on a project of expropriation and dispossession, the ‘luxurious’ becomes a station riddled with precarity. What is ‘fabulous’ and what is ‘Ghetto Fabulous’ often is in constant, if not eternal flux. Luxurity then is a performance — a signifier with no sign, a wealth with no home. This body of work comes about by way of vinyl flooring, gold plating, limousines and cornucopias of pork rinds. At the end of the ride and at the nexus of both the ghetto and the fabulous is a road map towards making oneself cared for —if only for a moment— against the odds of material condition.

Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998) 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’s work has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Strada Gallery, New York. They were the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s MN Art Prize and are a recent artist in residence with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency and Second Shift Studio Space of Saint Paul. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science and is currently a first-year MFA candidate in sculpture at the Yale School of Art.

Generous support provided by Donna and Jim Pohlad, Nancy Warner and Andrew Duff, Susan and Peter Lindahl, Rosina Yue, Rebecca Heidenberg and Gregory Smith, Melissa and Jon Crow, Jori and Rob Sherer, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

This exhibition is also made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Downey would like to extend special thanks to Steven and Hunter Downey of Silverback Detailing, Sati VM, Yonci Jameson, M Jamison, Namir Fearce, Arame, Ella, Vee, Henry, Tano, Janai, Cristina, Athena, Jaelee and Harmonee of the Contemporary Lab, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency, Hair+Nails, and Entity Editions.