Louis Cameron: NOW IS THE TIME
October 22 – December 14
Emerson Contemporary Presents: Billboards, posters and text-based works in “Louis Cameron: Now Is the Time” Exhibition explores the civil rights movement, gun violence, and hip hop culture.
Emerson Contemporary proudly presents Louis Cameron: Now is the Time, featuring billboards, posters and text-based works that explore the civil rights movement, gun violence and hip hop culture. It is underway, on view through December 14, 2024 at Emerson College’s Media Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Boston.
The free exhibition features several large-scale, wall-mounted vinyl text pieces from the ongoing Hip Hop Onomatopoeia series, a body of work that explores the conversation on gun violence within hip hop music. The works are text based, using the onomatopoeia of gun shots in hip hop songs as their reference. Cameron focuses on onomatopoeia because of its emotional resonance. Additional works from the Excavation and Displacement series are also on view.
Exclusively for this exhibition, Cameron designed a limited-edition take home poster titled
I Got To Have It, serving as a monument to Hip Hop culture and black music in Boston. It features a poem that peels back the layers of a song to reveal its connections to the history of Black music. Indicative of Hip Hop’s sampling culture, the poem is composed of a source song and the song titles that it sampled from.
Notably, these sampled songs touch on key points in the lineage of Black music such as James Brown, the Blues, and spirituals. The poster addresses urban realities and gun violence, the self-determination of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, and features the title of a song that refers to the African American spirituals such as Wade in the Water. The choice of typeface provides a reference to Hip Hop culture for the presentation of the poem.
Additionally, Cameron will present the “I AM… Portfolio” a group of posters addressing the recent violence against Black men and disregard for their lives in America. The title refers to rally calls and protest chants from the 1960s to the present. While violence against Black people is center stage in the current American cultural conversation, presenting a project by Black male artists – including Sanford Biggers, Rashid Johnson, and Shaun Leonardo, among others – offers valuable insights and counter representation.
Louis Cameron was born in Columbus, Ohio, USA; lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He earned a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia.
https://www.louiscameron.com/