miCHAEL cameron

Michael Cameron's new series of large format paintings depict moments where light quality, expression and gesture are distilled to communicate, translate and provoke discussion on the part of the viewer. Through painting, Cameron creates an atmospheric environment utilizing colour and subject matter that outwardly appears nostalgic, suggesting perhaps an optimistic post war late 1940's - early 1950's.Yet simultaneously, impartial characters peer back at the viewer, snapping the observer back into a sharp focus. Cameron elicits a comprehensive view that equally reflects a world of surveillance, paranoid political movements, and global uncertainty that is as relevant during the cold war and McCarthyism as it is today in a world that regularly considers terrorism and climate change.

Cameron builds complex and active compositions using a diverse range of source material that seemingly possess unusual relationships yet through his skill as a painter are presented cohesively. Cameron's paintings are composed from field sketches, childhood memories and recent observations such as big box stores and trailer parks, meshed with grinning dogs and caped crusaders.

Throughout Cameron's painting career the dog has been a reoccurring symbolic figure. Through roles of companionship, guardian and working, man and dog have historically shared a symbiotic relationship. The dog has often played a symbolic part in literature and art. Dogs have symbolically served to evaluate and offer comment on the human condition adding their wise comment from the personal to the political, and from the domestic sphere to the destructive sphere of war and turmoil. Cameron not only builds upon this historical context of dog as symbol but also utilizes the Dog as an accessible entry point between viewer and the painted subject matter. Cameron's dogs encounter the viewer through their direct gaze. They invite us to peer closer into Cameron's composed environments. And his dogs permit us to reflect upon the world around us.

The Unfiltered Gaze is the follow-up exhibition to Cameron's sold out exhibition Still Motion in June 2006. A graduate from the Ontario College of Art, Cameron completed in 1984 with a B.F.A. with honors. Michael Cameron currently resides and paints in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His work can be found in collections across Canada, The United States and England.

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