Cameron
Madame X
Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Cameron (1922-1995), the first full scale Los Angeles show of work by the artist since her retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2015.
An enigmatic figure in the early days of the California art scene, Cameron was a visionary painter, draftsman, actress and poet who bridged the spiritual and artistic counter cultures flourishing in Los Angeles and Hollywood. After a stint in the navy as a cartographer, she returned to California and became the wife and spiritual avatar of Jack Parsons, a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an influential leader of the philosophical group Ordo Temple Orientis. Cameron's art and lifestyle were influenced by her relationship to Parsons who died six years after their 1946 marriage. Parson's death had a profound effect on Cameron, and in the late 1950's, she destroyed much of her work.
Cameron was a mentor and friend to artist Wallace Berman who became enthralled with her artwork, poetry, and mystical persona. In 1955, Berman published a photograph of Cameron on the cover of his journal Semina along with an image of her drawing Peyote Vision, 1955 which is included in our current exhibition. Depicting a serpent-tongued woman in a sex act with an alien being, an image of the work was also incorporated in Berman's exhibition at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957. Deemed "lewd" by the Los Angeles Police Department, the drawing resulted in the temporary closing of the gallery when Berman was arrested for obscenity, tried and found guilty. After the incident, Cameron refused to show her art in commercial galleries, further cementing her role as an underground avant garde mystic. As an actress, Cameron played the Scarlett Woman in Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1956), and Curtis Herrington documented her role as a visual artist in a short film entitled The Wormwood Star (1955).
Hardy Hill
The Easy Yoke
Hardy Hill’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, entitled The Easy Yoke, is comprised of five unique prints on sheets of rag paper. The show’s title comes from Matthew 11:28: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you...and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” A yoke is a device for joining together a pair of draft animals, a sort of metonym for the burdens they are expected to bear. How, one might ask, could this be easy?
Hardy Hill (b. 1993) is an artist and writer who is currently completing his master’s studies in the fields of theology and philosophy of religion. His recent projects include Heart Failures, a novella in verse published by Lomex in 2017, and My Whole World, a short story collection published by Neue Alte Brücke in 2015. Recent solo and group exhibitions include You, Ruined Creature at Commercial Street, Provincetown (2019), Metamodernity at Robert Grunenberg, Berlin (2019) and Foul Perfection (2019) at Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt. This is his first exhibition with Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles.