Cammie Staros

Lives and works in Los Angeles

Artist statement

I make sculptures that draw from classical antiquities and the contexts in which we view them. I'm interested in exploring and complicating the narrative of Western Art History, in the ways histories are constructed and reinforced by museums, and in the predictive power of artifacts that symbolize both the rise and fall of civilizations. This latter point has taken on more conceptual weight in recent years, as I connect the fruits of fallen empires to the political and environmental threats to contemporary civilization. Modern display devices locate the relics I reference not in ancient Greece or Rome but in the institutions where they have been viewed for the last two hundred years, implicitly asking where today’s objects may find themselves in another couple of millennia. I began imagining answers to that question: forgotten museums of antiquities reclaimed by nature. Vases evolve into shells. Fluorescent lights discolor and drip out of their fixtures. Delicate chain spiderwebs creep over sculptural surfaces. Solid stone seems to melt. Encased ceramics are submerged and inhabited. My work has long been both of and about its art-historical lineage, but I’ve lately been considering the drive to make things in the first place as a human lineage, as our animal behavior. Some recent works are half-vase and half-shell— a hybrid form caught in a moment of unlikely evolution or a visual analogy of things we creatures leave behind. In referencing the familiar legacy of the...

Artwork