Dissection

Josey proudly presents Dissection: An exhibition of work by the artist Sarah Cameron.

Sarah Cameron’s work excavates a dialectic of the formal and the female, rendered not as simple unity, but as a constitutive tension. Here invocations of women revolutionaries,­ theorists and artists sit alongside anecdotes and personal materials that we might be tempted to project on the artist herself. And whilst this proximity of the personal and the political is clear, their relation, like many of the juxtapositions explored in Cameron’s work, is far from straightforward: apparently autobiographical disclosures seem specious, bizarre or outlandish; cut canvases appear aside portraits of upside down heads; a photograph of artist’s pregnant body on its half bed is quite literally severed of its indexical function.

The act of the cut, as formal technique, is the basic unit; a register of how a plane behaves when breached, how contact becomes contour, curve or radical break, suggesting a dialogue with an older tradition and a point of departure. Dissections here reorient our gaze not at the orthogonal space beyond the canvas but at the subject who might be glimpsed behind it; the refusal for the pieces to fully cohere is not so much a deception as a means of inducing engagement, the opening of a conversation.

Cameron’s work invokes the thought of the late Marina Vishmidt, who sought to read speculative tendencies in contemporary art practises both with and against a pervasive economic logic which increasingly speculates on subjectivity itself. If the artist, like the investor, often stood as a purveyor of a form of value apparently not indexed by labour time - whether through “dematerialised” art objects or simply gentrified neighbourhoods - it obscured and concealed its inverted image; the subject as split, or incommensurable, those creative and (re)productive labours not measured by value.

One posits a domain of speculation that is total, unified and complete, but on the condition of a limit; that the speculator themself is excluded from this domain as its paradoxical exception. The other marks the failure of this limit, the impossibility of the whole, and the truth of the lie of the exception. Which is to say, in Cameron’s work speculation as imposture gives way to speculation as masquerade, just as sublimity gives way to sublimation.

”Cuts are not made to create the illusion of sculptural depth in painting,
they are made to find the edge of something and how the edge curves
away from its taut plane when cut.”

This jacket belongs to my mum’s financial advisor. It hangs at the back of his office. He maintains his eccentric character, in the face of all that abstract number crunching.



He is part of our portrait. We are partly a piece of a man who wears very precise Italian suits, chain smokes cigars, dyes his hair jet black and spends every second weekend in the Canaries.



He meticulously digs through codes, searching for every small loophole. He deals in reimbursing life hours.