The Armory Show – Platform: Cammie Staros

Cammie Staros has been selected as one of eight artists for The Armory Show Platform section. The presentation also features works by Diana Al-Hadid, Benny Andrews, Julian Charriere, Tau Lewis, Grayson Perry, Michael Rakowitz, and Yinka Shonibare CBE. Curated by Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge of Contemporary Art and Programming at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the section features works that aim to bridge societal, historical and geographical divisions. This year's theme is Can you hear the fault lines breathing?  

Looking specifically to the shapely vessels of Classical Greece, Cammie Staros's hand-built objects marry ancient ceramic techniques with modern industrial materials such as milled and turned woods and machined metals. The resulting sculptures are rooted in history, yet disarmingly present. Staros often mines images and artifacts from the Greco-Roman period that aestheticize eroticism, violence, and victory. The artist anthropomorphizes her sculptures through references to armor and dress—often a gendered divide—as traditionally depicted on Greek figure vases. Staros’s fascination with classical antiquities lies both in the objects themselves and with how those objects have come to represent an origin story of Western art history. Her works remind us that historical narratives are told through visual languages as much as written ones. Staros contributes her own symbology to a constellation of references from far-flung regions and eras, and entices her audiences to reexamine the role of historical objects. Through her ceramic sculptures, the artist considers the representation of desire, violence, gender codes, and institutional tropes of display, all embedded in the materials and images of antiquity.

 Cammie Staros (b. 1983, Nashville, TN) has had solo exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Lefebvre & Fils, Paris;  and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work was presented in the 2020 Clay Biennial at the Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles and is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a Thames & Hudson survey of contemporary sculpture. Staros was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020. Staros received her BA in Art and Semiotics from Brown University (2006) and her MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (2011). She lives and works in Los Angeles.