Nino Mier Gallery is thrilled to present REVELRY, an exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Cameron Welch on view in Los Angeles from March 24 - April 29, 2023. Welch’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, REVELRY will include a series of monumental mosaics recounting epic stories of contemporary American life laden with references to ancient mythology, art history, and his own identity. 

Welch’s expressive surfaces bring together narratives and iconographies culled from sources ranging from classical antiquity to modern pop culture and urbanism. His congested bricolages reflect the horror vacui of contemporary commodity culture. This “fear of the empty” expresses itself both in the panoply of materials Welch uses to craft his mosaics—marble, stone, glass, and tile, primarily—and in the resulting compositions.

Black Bacchus (2023), for instance, envisions the ancient Roman god as a person of color. Satyrs, donkeys, and men playing khitaras populate the composition. But the mosaic not merely a revisionist expression of an ancient myth: On the mosaic’s right side, Welch references Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a painting famous for its appropriation of the semiotics of African art. The central demoiselle provides a surface within the mosaic for a series of grimacing figures consuming wine and grapes. Bacchus, god of hedonistic excess, becomes a conduit for Welch to explore Modern and contemporary racial politics within art history and cultural production/consumption systems.

Welch also weaves representations of his own memories throughout the mosaics. The Hero Within (2023), for instance, is a self-portrait of his fraught experience growing up biracial in the Midwest. A grinning skeleton emerges from a central figure that’s been bisected, as if cleaved in half top-down. One half of the figure has darker skin, while the other has lighter skin. To its left, a cartoonishly drunken devil holds a paint palette and a set of brushes. On its right, a haloed cherub holds a bottle of wine. Both the devil and the cherub clasp the ropes and chains beleaguering the central figure’s wrists, literalizing a moral and ethical battle between good and evil. Throughout the work, Welch presents references to Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), lovers kissing behind windows, and angels falling. This playful mix of codes begets a more serious consideration of displaced peoples and histories.

With a masterful command of his medium, Welch builds surfaces that challenge viewers to reconsider who and what ought to be immortalized in marble and stone. Mosaic has been practiced globally since antiquity, yet Welch notes that its legacy in African art history and culture is often neglected by Western art institutions. Welch addresses this oversight—and the power dynamics which produce it—within his work. Many of Welch’s figures are surrounded by gold glass hand-gilded by the artist in 24 karat gold leaf. Swaths of marble-printed porcelain are humorously scattered amid patterned backgrounds: Welch states that “where I’m from, all the marble was fake.” Welch’s material polyphony conjures the dizzying cacophony of intersecting semiotic systems and histories—what Welch refers to as a “black hole of nostalgia.”