Archive
Tommy Camerno
Starecase
08.04.2023 – 07.05.2023
Architectural historian John Templer labels the staircase a ‘beautiful siren with many facets to its complex nature … it is art object, structural idea, manifestation of pomp and manners, behavioural setting, political icon, legal prescription and poetic fancy’.1 In his solo exhibition at Flatland Projects, Tommy Camerno leans into these diverse cultural entanglements embedded in the staircase. Utility and infrastructure meet opulence and ornament. Tender tones are sliced with a sense of carnivalesque euphoria. Signifiers of domestic comfort such as doting cats, or frozen peas, are playfully meshed with public architectural fragments. Operating within this series of juxtapositions, Camerno teases out associations and elongates social short hands, unravelling ‘behavioural settings’ as Templer puts it. Observation sits at the core of this show, as Camerno questions how different bodies move within public and private realms, using the staircase to dig deeper into the histories preserved within built environments.
E M Forster’s 1922 text Alexandria was an evocative resource for Camerno as he developed this body of work, its sensorial flair being notably reflected within the vignettes encasing the installation. Mirroring Forster’s ability to bring readers into the streets of this ancient city, Camerno’s panels have an immense sense of spatial resonance. Traversing interior and exterior settings, each of these modular metalworks further cultivates an understanding of place. A dreamy site emerges which moves freely between celestial and terrestrial parameters. Depicting angels, pets, and lovers, it’s unclear whether these figures will meet one another. Have they danced underneath the same chandelier, have their eyes met in a stairwell, or will their paths never cross? These finely spun narratives are cast in steel, with the tangled scroll sculptures echoing this sense of romantic possibility.
Amongst this poetic fog, specific references do surface in the show. Schlossbrücke emulates the mermen the artist encountered at the Schlossbrücke Bridge in Berlin, built in 1824. This sighting sparked further interest in uncovering homo-erotic design within classical architecture, fuelling a curiosity for who cities are built for and how this may have shifted historically. Camerno’s panels capture moments of quotidian queer exchanges, the relationships rendered may be between winged beings or mermen, yet these works cement a presence much awaited in public space. The need to mobilize these otherworldly creatures to examine the contours of queer ways of being speaks volumes in itself. In Camerno’s own words “an Angel is someone who has already been forgiven”.
This tussle between revelry and sincerity runs as a constant throughout the presentation. Glossy, dripping rhinestones, accents of neon paints and lime green beads bring an effervescent, kitsch aesthetic, whilst tableaux of lonely figures, and trailing pastel ribbons bring a sobering quality to the space, recalling memories of lost love. In a chameleonlike manner, the staircase is transformed and contorted by Camerno, oscillating between flat and sculptural planes as a depository for ideas. Thinking through the politics of monuments, each piece functions as a proposition, memorialising grand moments of amour, the beady eyes of a cat or quieter moments of connection— begging the question of who or what we choose to pedestal.
Fran Painter-Fleming
1 John Templer, The Staircase, History and Theories. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, MIT Press, 1992). pg. 4.