64. Cameron Welch Pathfnder signed, titled and dated “CAMERON WELCH PATHFINDER 2018” on the reverse oil, acrylic, spray paint, ceramic, and found objects on panel 78 3/4 x 68 1/2 in. (200 x 174 cm.) Executed in 2018. Provenance The Artist
Born 1990, Indianapolis, IN Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY 2016 MFA, Columbia University, NY 2013 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Selected honors: SAIC Distinguished Scholarship of Merit, The Elizabeth C. Nolan Shortridge PTA Scholarship. Cameron Welch’s work puts forth an explosive cross between painting and mosaic, bringing classical mythology into the 21st century. Quickly rising in the international art world, Welch developed his recent mosaic works as a continuation of his interest in the juxtaposition of images and materials. As Welch wrote in his 2016 artist statement: “My work is invested in visual information, and how materials have content inherent in them.” His varied use of materials and processes, including collage, sewing, dying, and painting, has recently expanded to encompass the ancient practice of mosaic making. “You go to the Met and you don’t see people of color,” the 28-year old artist told VICE in May 2018. “What do you do when you want to pose a new paradigm in representation? People always look back to look forward but stop at like 1950, and I’m like, ‘Why can’t we look back to Greece and ancient craf making?’”
Working within the tradition of the ready-made, Welch constructs mythical worlds by using smashed objects and materials he fnds while dumpster-diving: brooms, mirrors, CDS. As Welch explained the inspiration behind using mosaics in his work: “I was thinking a lot about what could be a new myth and trying to create a new world where people of color get to be represented in this way. So I thought about mashing ancient myths around beauty, sexuality, and identity with more modern signifers. There are CDs—which are like fossils in the world now because we don’t use them anymore. I was interested in the stories they evoke for people.” Culturally signifcant objects like a MIDI keyboard and a car rim fgure as specifc references to time and identity in Welch’s elaborate compositions, bringing the street into the realm of history painting. Pathfnder confronts the viewer with a larger-than-life deity, the objects it is created from putting forth oblique references to time and identity. “I’m putting Black fgures in romantic spheres to do away with the construct that people of color can’t be represented in that way,” Welch explained. “I’m an artist that doesn’t want to be bound, materially speaking, to one mode of representation. I think it’s all about pushing a new myth of liberated existence in terms of selfidentifcation but also knowledge and narrative. I think it’s all about being free.”