Cammi Climaco

Lower East Side Printshop published This Time in Heaven, a set of five prints by Cammi Climaco through Special Editions Residency Program in 2010.

Cammi Climaco draws from a wide pool of pop cultural references to elucidate the hidden emotional realms of sexuality, love and romance. While these are standard themes for pop music, it is rare for a visual artist to place them at the center of her work.  Indeed, contemporary mass culture, including pop music, is key themes for Climaco and a lens through which she examines the feral territory that is her subject. 

Her work seems disarmingly simple at first, but its sophistication becomes apparent with exposure. Climaco’s success with potentially corny subjects is due to an ability to skillfully and simultaneously balance several dichotomies: frivolity and seriousness, lightness and darkness, humor and morbidity, camp and elegance, among others.

Climaco is primarily an installation artist. For her Printshop residency, she created a body of loosely related pieces that can be displayed individually or together. Her installation, This Time in Heaven, presents a confused, effusive emotional landscape that rides the heights and depths of love through five individual pieces.

In Please Release Me, Climaco suggests the extremes of sweetness and torture that accompany romantic love. The title refers to a melodramatic pop song that has been covered by singers from Elvis to Dolly Parton. Climaco’s first exposure to the song was in a K-Tel commercial in her youth; she was interested in exploring the guilty pleasure effusive pop songs can inspire.  

The sensual, luxurious nature of Please Release Me’s screenprinted orchid imagery, purposely off-register, is heightened by a support of moiré silk and hand-applied color.  Climaco sees orchids as a metaphor for female sexuality. The specific genus in Please Release Me is borrowed from Marcel Proust’s use of Cattaleya orchids in Remembrance of Things Past to suggest the unspoken sexual aspects of Charles Swann’s and Odette de Crecy’s relationship. Climaco’s choice of materials was guided by her intention to evoke a Laura Ashley prom dress, circa 1985, a campy insider reference suggesting budding sexuality and rites of passage, particularly for women of the John Hughes generation.

Climaco carries the orchid theme into Heights, a relief and aquatint etching in which the blooms seem to be backlit in a twilight landscape, an effect intensified by the artist’s choice of Magnani Pescia blue paper.  Visually, she was inspired by the gradient tones commonly used in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Heights is meant as a contrast to Please Release Me, reflecting the dark underside of sexuality. 

Hero Worship addresses the power of pop music. Climaco explores a song’s ability to be deeply connected to a specific emotional experience or to evoke a range of feelings from elation to sorrow. The image of the head and neck of a guitar is a direct reference to the famous 1969 Woodstock poster. In Hero Worship, Climaco contrasts delicate coloring and execution with wood veneer and flocking — materials associated with banal tastes — for a final image that oscillates between camp and sophistication.

This Time strikes a sweet, straightforward note. Butterflies appear here and elsewhere in Climaco’s work as the ‘butterflies-in-the-stomach’ variety.  She also uses butterflies as a metaphor for personal transformation. Laser-cut wings give the butterflies in this multiple depth and movement. Robin’s-egg silk shantung hides behind the wings, suggesting perfect blue skies.

Votary, in contrast to the giddiness of This Time, is a stark, mysterious image with a wry twist. The “dark secret” theme has previously appeared in Climaco’s work and evolved from a quotidian exchange in a hardware store. She had ordered black paint and when she arrived to pick it up, the clerk said, “Oh, you’re here for the Dark Secret,” the paint company’s name for the shade. Climaco was struck by the phrase and has since mined its suggestive power. Climaco’s choice of wood veneer evokes the wood paneling commonly used as a backdrop for covert suburban basement activities.

- Excerpt from essay LESP Special Editions 2010: New Decade, New Directions written by Sarah Kirk Hanley