Louis Cameron at Galerie Michael Janssen

Louis Cameron’s debut at Michael Janssen is split into two sections, one for every of the gallery’s flooring. Flanking the L-shaped areas of the bottom degree are Cameron’s “Collage Work,” 2021–22, which he has been assembling in elements ever since relocating to Berlin from the US in 2015. The supply supplies are images that Cameron has been taking as he perambulates by means of the town, their compositional logic derived from African American quilting. The size of every work conform to the usual printing sizes for posters, offering a proper constraint for the lengthy vertical cuts of paper that make up these wealthy, summary collages. Mounted on canvas, the ensuing “quilts” are located equally between the artist’s personal biographical trajectory and the for much longer purview of the migration of Black People from the South into city facilities. Cameron assiduously reanimates the design and intelligence of discovered and discarded supplies from the nineteenth century to the current, whereas consciously coupling African American quilting with the historical past of early modernism.

Turning to the right here and now, the second flooring options two wall-mounted items from Cameron’s ongoing collection “Final Phrases,” 2020–, wherein the artist spells out the ultimate utterances of Black People who’ve died because of police violence. Collectively, the 2 collection weave by means of one another, routing the private and biographical into the language of the on a regular basis, which, for some, is all the time skilled towards a horizon of eradication.

— Colin Lang