Cammie Staros

Looking specifically to the shapely vessels of Classical Greece, the artist’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 aestheticizes 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’ 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; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) received her BA from Brown University, Providence, in 2006 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, in 2011. Staros has had solo exhibitions at Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI; The SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles. The artist was included in the Craft Contemporary’s second clay biennial in Los Angeles. Staros’ work is featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow, a survey of contemporary sculpture, authored by Kurt Beers and published by Thames & Hudson. She has also been featured in Artforum, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Autre Magazine, and the X–TRA art journal. She has been awarded residencies by the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. Staros was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2020. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum, WA; and the Hood Museum of Art, NH.

Download Artist's CV

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present What Will Have Being, a series of new sculptures by Los Angeles-based artist Cammie Staros. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The artworks in What Will Have Being draw the relics of fallen empires into discourse with contemporary political and environmental instabilities, considering the legacy of our species on this planet. Creating a throughline between ancient past and possible future, the works suggest a museological exhibition of antiquities that has been forgotten and reclaimed by nature. Through twists on Greco-Roman works in ceramic and stone, and gestures that upend traditional display tactics – such as melting light fixtures, architectural interventions, and submerged vessels – the artist asks us to consider how we understand both the objects and ourselves along an unfixed or perhaps unmoored timeline.