Cameron Kerr: BEYOND THOUGHT FORMS

Beyond Thought Forms is Cameron Kerr’s first solo exhibition after graduating with an MFA from the University of British Columbia (2019). The exhibition provides insight into Cameron Kerr’s continued interest in locating a dialectical space between physical and metaphysical experiences. What is revealed is an aesthetic position that locates itself within the allegorical conflict between our natural and designed environment.

Cameron Kerr is interested in how images strike us and the effects of technology on aesthetic perception. Whether in photographs, paintings, prints or sculptures, what appears more than anything in Kerr’s practice are repetitive structures and patterns. According to Kerr, this attention to form derives from his attempt to reconcile images that recur in his dreams with images he finds repeated in the built and natural environment around him (nature, art, architecture, design). What fascinates Kerr about abstraction (organic or geometric) is that it can function as a node for the disparate experiences around him. This, he has realized, is because his thought forms are connected to the very architecture of the visual cortex. Here is where science and imagination find an anchor of sorts.

Cameron Kerr grew up in Campbell River, British Columbia, starting his career on fishing boats. There, Kerr learned not only how to tie nets and catch fish but also how to navigate the complex cultural and environmental context of the West Coast of British Columbia. For Kerr, this required a certain degree of pattern recognition which, in the early 2000s, he began to translate into a variety of artistic forms including landscape design and sculpture. In the late 1990s, Kerr moved to Carrara Italy where he spent three years in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, studying marble with Manuel Neri, an early participant in San Francisco’s Bay Area Figurative Movement. There he learned to read material densities and patterns such as the veins of marble in order to liberate imagined or actual internal forms, a skill which he has since expanded to other material explorations such as metal, which he learned about under the guidance of Antony Gormley in London, England. With these skills, Kerr set out to explore the historical and contemporary implications of his material practice by pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (2006) and most recently an MFA supervised by Gareth James at the University of British Columbia (2019).

The exhibition is curated by Patrik Andersson, Associate Professor at Emily Carr University