Pressing...talk soon, Cameron Cameron & Erin Morris

For Cameron Cameron and Erin Morris, there’s no such thing as a minor detail or a bad view. Morris’ paintings turn the spoked surface of an orange into the center of the sun; the Earth itself shrinks to a whorled ellipse, partially hidden, set in a black expanse. On the surface of Cameron’s sundial, that shape repeats as the lidded eye of a horse, rendered patina green. A segment of barbed wire crosses the horse’s muzzle: the grounds of the Huntsville Penitentiary, zoomed in on the faces of its animal occupants.

In these works, distance and proximity have a similar capacity to reveal something obscured, something essential. On Cameron’s sundial, the stretch of barbed wire hints at its carceral context, yet the artist has chosen to focus her lens on the faces of these horses. We can see every hair on their noses, the fine texture of their lashes, the curve of each nostril. Here, a method of telling time—the sundial—becomes a method of decelerating time. The artist’s work is to walk the perimeter of the barbed wire fence, to stop and look, to deliberately record the breath that persists at the periphery of sites of violence.

Morris’ work, too, uses slowness as a tactic to reassign significance. Her larger series of paintings is irregularly punctuated by four paintings of daffodils, viewed from slightly different vantage points. Rather than painting the same foliage in different seasons, creating a linear sequence, Morris has painted the same daffodils in the same season—perhaps, even, in the same hour of the same day. The flowers, a bright, ubiquitous yellow, droop heavy with pollen. They bloom. They are still blooming. Each time I return to the daffodils, I slow down to the pace of their blooming, the flowers’ experience of their own lifespan superseding my own. 

Morris and Cameron are apt documentarians of visual patterns. On the hidden underside of Cameron’s sundial, collaged photos of found objects and artifacts overlap, fracture, and occlude, as if seen from the bottom of a pool. Morris’ cityscapes, meanwhile, abstract into almost bioluminescent landscapes of blurred power grids and streaked headlights. What is the difference, if I squint, between a swarm of fireflies and the lights of a city seen from above? To live in an age that has created the conditions that allow this visual connection—what has it cost? 

Placed together, these pieces create their own weave of textures and allusions. My eye repeatedly lands on the cyclical movements of time represented here: arc of a shadow across a face, orbit of a planet around the sun, bright needle of a speedometer. A waterspout, marked by rust. This is a chronometer composed of objects, hours, locations. It is accretional. A collection of seashells has been arranged in neat rows on a paper towel; a rural stretch of highway flatlines into the horizon. 

In Pressing…talk soon, Erin Morris and Cameron Cameron ask us to make our attention more immediate. They want us to run our fingers along the threads strung between the organic and the synthetic, the microscopic and the planetary. It matters, the artists are suggesting, what exactly things suggest. However long it takes, it matters where we look.