The Breathtaking Work of an ‘Artist’s Artist’ - The Tyee

Listen to this article 9 min Why do we make things? ANNOUNCEMENTS, EVENTS & MORE FROM TYEE AND SELECT PARTNERS Bard on the Beach’s ‘Antigone’ Gives New Voice to the Women In this contemporary adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy, playwright Kate Besworth focuses on family, inheritance and the choices we make. CONTEST: See Aysanabee and More at ‘Come Toward the Fire’ One lucky Tyee reader will receive four tickets to the closing concert, hosted by Dallas Goldtooth, on Sept. 20 at the Chan Centre. If you’re an artist like Cameron Kerr, you don’t have much choice. “This is what I do, every day of the week,” the sculptor explains from his East Vancouver studio. The amount of work on Kerr’s studio walls is, in a word, staggering. Outside in a covered area, larger-scale sculptural pieces in different stages of completion reside. Kerr’s work, like the man himself, is big and possessed of considerable presence. But it is also curiously fluid, moving in unexpected fashion to incorporate a dizzying array of ideas, images and manifestations. Cameron Kerr: Collecting the Unconscious, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work at Griffin Art Projects in North Vancouver, runs until mid-August. Curated by the Trapp Projects’s Patrik Andersson, Collecting is a deeply curious compendium of the familiar and the wildly idiosyncratic. Born in Campbell River, Cameron Kerr came to art because, as he describes it, he was one of those kids who wouldn’t stop drawing. Photo courtesy of Cameron Kerr. This range shouldn’t come as a surprise. In my hours spent to talking to Kerr, the conversation roamed from Canadian rural accents to the home studio of the famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Curiously enough, Brion Gysin, creator of the Dreamachine, an interactive work designed to bring on a hypnagogic state, also popped up. Which is fitting, given that many of the pieces in Collecting the Unconscious are doing exactly that. The collection surfaces the interstitial place between sleep and wakefulness, where the conscious mind takes one last gasp before the body slips under the dark water of sleep. Born in Campbell River, Kerr came to art because, as he describes it, he was one of those kids who wouldn’t stop drawing. At age 20, he moved to Italy to study marble at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara with American sculptor Manuel Neri. He subsequently immersed himself in the Bay Area Figurative Movement, and he studied metal with Antony Gormley in the U.K. Those experiences…