a Statement that tells:
Hello, I’m Cameron Jarvie,
I'm an interdisciplinary artist with a practice across objects, text, durational actions, live environments, and systems of interactive encounter. My work looks to unpick and/or direct the processes through which we draw meaning.
My approach, neither medium nor subject specific, blurs boundaries between the mythic, encyclopaedic and diaristic; Because memory is the medium I look to work with, and live-encounter or anecdote tend to be significant factors in creating deeper mental impressions, I often find my work categorised amongst performance or conceptual art practices.
An interest in myths and encyclopaedias held since childhood feels consistently relevant in my work. Lately my direction has been informed equally by experiences of burnout. I also feel that as a child of the internet and growing up in mega-cities, my relationship with urban environments and online space form an undercurrent to my attitude.
My latest endeavours are largely concerned with the human individual's position in the landscape of automation, atomisation, and acceleration of the Zettabyte era. This body of technological kinetic work, fitting with my history of durational experiential practice, offer spaces of contemplation, drama, and narrative reworking of coremost facets - action, emotion, body, time, meaning - of our understanding of human experience.
I liken my current artistic approach to Judo- looking, through the most simple, elegant and effective manoeuvres, to counteract the overwhelming forces of mass information and the political and cultural moment in which I live and flip them on their head to create gestures of beauty that carry essential qualities.
Like Francis Alys or Felix Gonzalez-Torres I keep my studio in my head, and consider my practice mostly an attitude or way of relating to the world. I produce my works (as their present selves equally) to exist in their secondary forms: Not as the objects, but as their memory. As information or imagination, seeds or activators for new realisations and relationships to emerge.
The best works, mine or otherwise, carry clarity, brilliance, and endurance- through memory, analogy, rumour, or directly mediated encounter, they become co-authored by their audiences.
My aim might be simply to get to the heart of things- That is my process, one of learning and understanding. I sometimes think of it as like going on a walk, from somewhere familiar, to somewhere less familiar, and back again. I would like through my work to extend this process with my audience. That I might take a viewer on a walk, from simple, through complex, to essential- and leaving behind a map such that they might on their own terms repeat this same journey in different ways.
a Statement that shows:
Cameron Jarvie has tried many times to nail down a short statement on his practice.
Every time he has been asked, he reimagines his statement from a different angle.
The individual statements never fully encapsulate what he's trying to do, and never will,
but each one forms a layer which together build back into a richer picture of his practice.
His work seeks to prompt and extend this process with the world around us-
maybe that's the point.