Cameron Patricia Downey — Lord Split Me Open

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, April 22, 2023. 6:00-9:00pm

HAIR + NAILS (H+N) is thrilled to present Lord Split Me Open, a solo exhibition by Minneapolis artist Cameron Patricia Downey. This whole-building installation includes photography, video, and sculpture and comes with much anticipation for the local arts community as well as the gallery. Downey first exhibited with HAIR+NAILS in Brooklyn, NY at 9 Herkimer Place in 2019. Next, their haunting body prints on paper were included in an early H+N group show FUTURE FUTURE (2020). The partnership between Downey and the gallery was deepened within the 2020 Uprising following George Floyd’s murder with her curation of Holding Space, a public installation of image, video, light and sound in the HAIR+NAILS front yard and front windows. As part of this, her riveting film “Hymn of Dust” was projected on the gallery façade on loop every weekend night for the entire summer. Later in 2020 they took over the HAIR+NAILS basement with Three Things Last Forever, a show of photography and kinetic sculpture. Two large-scale sculptures by Downey were included in the HAIR+NAILS curated show The Human Scale at Rochester Art Center in 2021. In 2022 Cameron’s film Hymn of Dust entered the Walker Art Center’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Cameron Patricia Downey has had a whirlwind few years exhibiting nationally and internationally. Lord Split Me Open at HAIR+NAILS is their first major solo exhibition.

IN THE ARTIST’S WORDS:
Lord Split Me Open concerns itself with the prevaricating nature of local memory, archive, human refuse and paramountly, those soft and foul things– sprawling, cursory, bogging and minute, that mean and perhaps always will have meant that we’ve lived.
Mysticism, affect, dust and remains take central and material form in Split Me Open’s attendance to and obsession with accumulation and the sweet, parsing cleave that follows.
— Cameron Patricia Downey

PRESS:
MPR article
MPLSart.com review
Art Papers review