03/10/2020
March Featured Artist Bio: Camille Wong
Animate Animal Animacy
AMAX Gallery
March 12 - April 8
To be animate is the state of being alive or living. The more alive something is, the more we imbue it with
agency, emotions, and sentience, and therefore, the less apt it is to die. The “animacy hierarchy” by John
Cherry organizes entities on a scale from most animate to least. It arranges humans at the top, followed by
animals, then inanimates, and lastly, incorporeals.
This linear scale explains how insults and racial slurs that refer to humans as animals are entangled with the
notion that humans are positioned above animals in this hierarchy-- language serves to reinforce this social
hierarchy of power. The videos in this exhibition depict the interfacing of humans in a digital environment. A
Janus-faced pig in Feeding Time exchanges dialogue sourced from Facebook posts from former and current
police officers. A commentary on how racism and lack of empathy conspire to dehumanize and restructure
power.
In another video, animism, or the attribution of a soul to inanimate objects, is explored in colors. Words
sourced from the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon flash on the screen, each one associated with a
color. Patterns and unconscious biases begin to emerge as researcher, Douglas Longshore, once theorized
that words with a positive affect are typically associated with the color white, while negative words are
associated with black. This work asks what implicit racial biases are internalized even in the most banal
details of our society.
Aside from human language, the media used in this exhibition comment on another language, the one lost
between our animal bodies and the animate earth. If the written language is a technology for humans to
communicate with each other, how has the emergence of digital technologies altered or muted speech with
nonhuman entities? Construction vehicle toys spin like tops in FKA Rock Dove . A POV shot in a digital
landscape, the pigeon cursor becomes a prostheses of the viewer-- actions performed through clicks, a
command sequence initiated by hot keys, movements directed by swiping gestures. The pigeon guides us
through an artificial terrain that is natural in subject, but foreign in this new environment.
The themes in this show return back to biopower and the innate fear that if humans are not the ones
dominating, then they will surely be dominated. An effective form of control is the Marxist theory of
estranged labor-- labor not only produces commodities but the workers themselves become cheaper
commodities as more capital is produced. The series of cement and earth castings provide this, as they recall
labor back to the hand. Titled Sisyphus , each cow hoof serves to emphasize the land, animal, and body it once
came from. Reduced to an inanimate body part, it is no longer an extension of the animal, but of the industry.
Camille Wong (b.1995, Oakland, California) is a Los Angeles based visual artist with dual B.A.s in Art and
Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her practice seeks to reconcile
environmental justice with capitalism. Her work has been shown at the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and she has exhibited her work throughout artist-run spaces in
Los Angeles including Monte Vista Projects, ArtShare LA, and Blueroof Studios. She received the Faculty
Award of Distinction in 2017. In an effort to stimulate cultural discourse regarding underrepresented voices,
she founded Cult Club , an online literary arts magazine dedicated to the intersection of arts and culture. She
currently lives and works in Los Angeles
