Through the use of bronze, stone, and ceramics, Cammie Staros critiques and reimagines the role of encyclopedic museums in preserving and presenting classical artifacts. Her creations, wobbly vases, delicately woven metals, and museum vitrines turned aquariums, evoke the aesthetic traditions of the museological display of classical antiquities and simultaneously point to the instability of civilizations in decline.

On the occasion of Staros’ exhibition, Sunken City, at the SCAD Museum of Art, the artist sits down with curator Ben Tollefson to discuss the exhibition and the broader implications of her work.

Ben Tollefson: Cammie, your work engages with Greco-Roman themes and aesthetics as a launching point to examine the present moment. I’m really curious if specific aspects of your background led you to use Greco Roman antiquities as such a central component in your work. Does your study of semiotics have anything to do with it?

Cammie Staros: Yes, my background in semiotics plays a big role in the way I think about work. When I was in grad school, I was focusing on non-verbal systems of communication, like measurements and semaphores. Specifically, I was interested in the way those systems interact with objects, bodies, and language. Soon after getting my MFA, I happened upon John Boardman's book on Athenian Black Figure Vases, the kind of classical Greek ceramics that you might see in the Met's Greek wing or the Getty Villa. The vases were so familiar to me and felt so iconic. It made me realize that (of course!) art history itself is a nonverbal system of communication, much bigger and more unwieldy than those I had been working with, but also one that I ultimately found much more engaging. So, I started referencing these Greek antiquities as a type of origin story of Western Art History. At the time, I thought I was going to move through the kind of historical trajectory a survey class might take. But here I am twelve years later, referencing the same classical relics, and they have only become more poignant as symbols of the rise of empires and the fall of civilizations in the contemporary context of compounding political and ecological crises.

BT: I’d like to talk about some important works in the show at the SCAD Museum of Art that address ecological crises, as you mention. These two aquarium works contain your vases as mirror images of one another. One is a vase-like form we might encounter when we're looking at real antiquities, and the other is its mirror image, submerged and sculpted as if seen through rippled water. You talked about the rise and fall of empires; can you talk about how these aquariums address those concerns and concerns about the climate crisis?

CS: I started conceptualizing my first aquarium-vitrine pieces a few years ago at a time when I, like many artists, was wondering if my work was the most impactful, most important thing I could be doing. These pieces were one answer to that, to more explicitly engage ideas of the climate crisis, of political crisis, of the responsibilities of our species. But I wanted to deal with those ideas without being prescriptive or even expository. I have an idea of a museum of antiquities that have been reclaimed by nature, but it’s not clear how or why that might have happened. For me, these works share space with modern anxieties but they also incorporate some of the beauties of the natural world and how cross-species interactions can add meaning and perspective to the way we think about what we put into the world. So, I’m using the ideas of antiquities and their display to tie together the fall-of-civilization doom that I referenced with the specific nature of that future fall — to cite the familiar legacy of the classical world as a way to think about the broader legacy of humans on this planet.

BT: For me, the aquarium works collapse time in interesting ways because you're referencing the past, but it's also a very present, living sculpture, with real fish and a living ecosystem. And it causes me to think about our future on this planet and whether the objects we make will survive. And if they do, how will we think about them in, say, 200 years? I wanted to talk a little bit about how you think about the concept of time in these works, or even more broadly.

CS: I'm glad you asked because I meant to touch on that. I hope those works in particular flatten historical time by simultaneously suggesting the ancient past, later underwater discoveries, the contemporary display of artifacts, and a possible future of today’s art objects. These works allowed me to more explicitly incorporate ideas of museological display, which have long been important in my thinking and practice but weren’t as visible in some of the earlier work I was doing. The modern systems of display introduce a second, contrasting timeline, and a distance (both temporal and contextual) between ancient relics and their current institutionalization. But it’s the “misuse” of those vitrines, filled with water and teeming with life, that suggests a far future when manmade objects might be reimagined or repurposed.

The Greek vases I look at were made around 2,500 years ago, which is so difficult to wrap my head around and yet much easier than conceptualizing that amount of time in the future. The mirroring of the vases in the recent aquarium pieces is partially a physical manifestation of that idea: thinking about the past as a way to reflect on the future. It’s a mental exercise to think about time on a scale far beyond our lifespan, which I think is about as much as most of us can comfortably picture. And recently I've been working with stone too, which adds a much, much bigger span of geological time to the temporal conversation. I’ve been thinking about these as a way to conceive the inconceivable, a strategy that has its own strong tradition in art history.

BT: Yes, you touched on the museological display, and I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. I was thinking back to the first time I encountered your work and I think it was at an art fair, which is obviously such an incredibly different context than the museum. Thinking about your work at the SCAD Museum of Art or in other institutional shows, what does that framework do to the work? And how do you think about the work in those two different kinds of contexts, since your work is so embedded in the language of the museum in many ways.

CS: You and the SCAD Museum gave me a great opportunity to bring the work into this institutional context where I think it’s at its most effective. I'm quoting (and critiquing) so-called encyclopedic museums, but some of my display systems and gestures still become camouflaged in a contemporary museum because they're speaking an institutional language. There is a really interesting tension where aspects of the work almost disappear within a museum context and then reappear as an explicitly contemporary self-awareness of that same context, like with those vitrine aquariums where you can’t help but see the vitrine, and with it the conventions and displays that hold up works to be admired. That push and pull is really exciting to me.

BT: Speaking of the display of the work and being in an institution, I'd love to touch on the layout of the show and the work that we did to make a very custom space for your work. It has constructed walls and keyhole cutouts and other different ways to engage with the work, even an unfinished wall with metal studs. What are some of the motivations for these kinds of layouts?

CS: One of the central ideas is the layout of those same encyclopedic museums which is a sort of umbrella display housing the conventional vitrines and stands I was talking about. Collections of artifacts are often organized along winding halls that feel disorienting to me even while leading to an inevitable conclusion. I was also thinking a lot about the story of the Minotaur and the labyrinth that imprisoned him, and I wanted to layer that mythological labyrinth onto the maze-like halls of institutions. The layout is doing that double reference, but it also allows for strange, intimate spaces to encounter work and interesting installations, such as the keyholes you referred to. And it highlights the differences in expectations and strategies between a contemporary art museum and an older style of institution. Each of those factors is interesting to me, especially when I can do all of them at once. And there are more recent references in there, too. I got my MFA at CalArts, where Michael Asher taught for years, and I feel like the aluminum stud wall pays some homage to him. It’s also a wall and not a wall. I wanted to have these narrow corridors while still allowing air and light to move through the space on a practical level and play with transparency and obfuscation — with what a wall is — on a more conceptual one.

BT: One really special thing about this show is that one of your wavy pots that’s currently on a windowsill in the space will be moved to its pedestal and replaced by your first bronze work, which was recently made in collaboration with the SCAD sculpture department in Atlanta. I'd love to hear more about this work, and especially as it relates to the human body; it's got a relationship with the aesthetic of the wavy pots, but also, much more of a direct reference to the body. Could you talk about that work?

CS: The form is a cuirass, which is armor consisting of a combined breast and back plate. In this case, the sculpture is in two pieces, suspended a bodies-width apart. I tend to work with materials in ways that respond to their historical uses, so when you brought up the opportunity to work in bronze, I knew I wanted to reimagine a form that would have historically been made in bronze. I also wanted to bring in a partial figure. I mentioned being interested in the Minotaur, but not why. That creature is emblematic of the kind of half-man-half-beast monster in mythology, which seems like a way to process the uncomfortable line between the human and non-human, the untamed nature within. So the idea of a half-man felt very relevant to the show. The form of this breastplate makes a half-man in two ways; it depicts the torso of a man, though it does so by articulating empty space, so half, both in that it is only a torso and that it is only a shell. I sculpted it to have the same melted quality as several of the other works in the show, and it will have a crusty green patina as if it was lost underwater for years.

BT: Speaking of moving the work from one place to another and replacing it with the bronze work; does that gesture relate in any way to ideas of change or precarity, elements you’ve talked about being important in your work?

CS: I was thinking of it in relation to change, and to the show as a dynamic structure. The aquarium pieces are, of course, dynamic by nature. The fish and snails do what they do. As somebody who can be a bit obsessive at certain phases of the process, it’s difficult for me to relinquish control, but it makes the work more interesting. I think of the addition of the new bronze and the intentional shift during the show as relating to that change. It's a dynamic gesture. And moving the art around relates to the movements of the viewer’s body, determined in this show more than most by the labyrinthine layout.

BT: One thing I wanted to address was materiality. I was listening to a previous interview that you did, in which you described using different and new types of materials as “throwing obstacles in your own way,” which I thought was a really interesting way to think about a studio practice. Can you expand on that a little bit?

CS: It's related to that sense of relinquishing control. I know that I have perfectionist tendencies, but I tend to like works that have a lot of humanity in them, works in which you can see the hand or are sympathetically wonky. I think about taking on challenges to myself as a way to ensure that the finished result is not overly predicted and to challenge that tendency towards precision. I came to clay after grad school, and I suspect that I think about it slightly differently than people who started in ceramics or started with any single material and continued with that material. Not that one approach is better than the other, but I like the sense of novelty and the challenge of an ever-broadening horizon of materials to work with. I talked before about planning to move through chronological references like a mental slide lecture of Art History 101. In some ways, I think of that as a kind of vertical expansion. So far, I haven't moved vertically very much, but I've moved horizontally. What I mean by that is that my references have gotten weirder and more varied. I've incorporated stone, jewelry, and neon, and I hope to work more in bronze and other materials. Each new medium brings new possibilities and new ideas to the same general history I started with.

BT: You said that after the opening of the show at the museum you had a little time to research and not do as much intense studio work. Are there new lines of thinking emerging in your practice?

CS: Well, I am already on a deadline again — I’m making some pieces for the Armory Show in New York. They are along the lines of the wavy, glitchy amphorae that I've been doing. There are changes in the way I'm thinking about them, but they're probably subtle to a reader. All of those pieces reflect another kind of obstacle I throw in my own way; I make things asymmetrically, which can challenge gravity. Much of my work fights gravity in one way or another, but some of the recent vases have been embracing gravity more, so they are perhaps more melty than glitchy. I'm still in that space. So big, new ideas might wait a few months.

BT: I know that you're such a big reader and a big audiobook listener, so I thought it would be interesting to hear a recommendation of some books that have really stood out to you in the past couple of years.

CS: Oh yes! There are a few tracks that my reading tends to follow. For people interested in the policy around climate change and potential ways forward, Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Ministry of the Future is an interesting read. The beginning is very dark, but it doesn’t just dwell on doom but speculates on actual change. I recently read Chasing Aphrodite, although it came out several years ago now, which dives into the Getty Museum’s scandal around collecting antiquities. I expected to be interested in the story for my own nerdy reasons, but it was a much juicier, more salacious read than I anticipated and foregrounds many of the problems with archeological collecting and museum holdings. And there have been so many retellings of Greek mythology. Madeline Miller is great, but I feel like she’s well-known and has been praised a lot. I haven’t heard people talk much about Pat Barker's two books retelling The Iliad and its immediate aftermath from the perspective of Briseis, the slave that Achilles “won.” In terms of criticism and theory, I’m currently thinking about Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter and Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape. And anything by Anne Carson. Always.

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