LAWSON & DECAMILLIS
Chris Lawson & Joe DeCamillis, Indie Rocker
You all should remember Chris Lawson’s collage work from our collage lecture a few weeks ago (Ah! That death card!) – he and a fellow Birmingham-based artist Joe DeCamillis have just compiled a selection of works from a three year collaboration that they describe as made for those “seeking the unknown & little known, the literary, the imaginative, the conjured, the light, shadow, color & grey, gray & the blue, blues & roots, leaves & trunks, old suitcases, vintage maps, Golden Age of Hollywood, spontaneous combustion of cinema into myriad URL’s spread across the worldwide web, & a 56th rebirth of poetry tucked away in songs of freak-folk songstresses from sea to shining sea…”
The things they make are wonderful – sculptural collage with southern gothic sensibilities and literary references, pop culture perversities and lovely textures. Check out all 56 pieces on their blog HERE.
What great pieces and mode of working, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I’m quite fond of REBEL YELL. It reminds me heavily of an almost pastiche of family photos in an inbred household and artwork hung up in hotels. There are lots of dualities happening in the collages concerning spirituality and the body.
a fine reading of their work, Aaron – especially with the push and pull of the spiritual/corporeal. Lawson’s work has always employed a grotesqueness that somehow never repels, instead it invites investigation and provides a kind of guilty pleasure – sort of like rubbernecking at a car crash, ya know? I think the work subtly and intelligently moves beyond simple “shock” and, like the collage of the DaDaists, engage in certain critical discourses through use of vernacular language, recontextualization and a load of sarcasm and humor.