Something About the Shortest Distance

Robin Cameron and Bea Parsons

April 7 - May 12, 2021

Something About the Shortest Distance, an exhibition of collaborative silk drawings and soldered brass stands by Bea Parsons and Robin Cameron, makes visible an ongoing exchange between the two artists. The eight silk panels were made remotely between 2020-2021 during quarantine.  The brass stands on display, repurposed from Cameron's previous exhibitions, demonstrate a shift in both artists’ modes of working. These works reflect Parsons’ and Cameron’s approach to their respective printmaking practices, translated to silk fabric. Instead of relying on the community enterprise of the print shop, they have shifted their practices to domestic and private spaces to continue to produce. The transparency of the silk fabric gives an overlapping visual effect by collapsing images, like distance, within the space.

The flat file of prints (available for purchase but not on display) highlight the artists printmaking practices: Bea Parsons recent ink monotypes and Robin Cameron’s chine collé monotypes created at Wingate Studio in 2016.

For this show Cameron contemplated conversations that the artists had surrounding the work and the exhibition:

Something about the shortest distance between two people. Something about screens and physicality, something about hiding and connection, something about interpretation, and imagining a printmaking process through a new lens. Something about making things easier for each other, but still making. Something about not seeing acquaintances, but continuing to be friends, something about after being a TA and help from students to make the work. Something about rolling it up and taking it with you, something about ironing and irony, something about it being non-toxic, something about mailing it in the post and the failed customs forms and the surprise at the two day delivery. 

Something about plexiglass and transparency, something about framing devices (not actually using frames to be specific) something about the strength but fragility of the brass and knowing it had been something before. Something about layering and repeating shapes, forms, motifs and people. Something about color and simplicity, something about the length. Something about how do we share, make and store these pieces. Something about responsibility and possibility.

Something about it not being paper, but coming from collage and the act of drawing. Something about it being related to women’s work and fabric, something about the ethereal nature, something’s working but second guessing, but something about there being too much stuff in the studio to read things properly, or putting the fabric against the wall because it’s hard to read it at all. Something about only understanding when the work can be seen. Something about the beauty of brass and the idea of pop up forms and ease of install and use. Something about just trying to make and experiment.

Something about art for the moment