Cameron Granger and Dominic Palarchio

CAMERON GRANGER AND DOMINIC PALARCHIO

July 9th – August 13th, 2022  

Abattoir Gallery presents new work by two artists with Midwest roots—Dominic Palarchio and Cameron Granger. Palarchio, who is from Detroit, works primarily in sculpture with byproducts of the automotive industry—specifically materials from and informed by his time spent at the auto shop. Granger, a video artist from Cleveland, now working in Columbus, draws on biographical imagery and histories of urban planning in his pieces, which range from straight video to sculptural installations. Palarchio works through abstraction, in contrast to Granger’s immersive storytelling. Together, the two artists deliver a holistic vision of possibility as they work to decipher the landscape of America’s heartland.  

Cameron Granger  

“If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.”   

Kublai Khan to Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible City (1972).  

Cameron Granger is a gifted storyteller, video and installation artist. In his first Cleveland gallery presentation, Granger shows two videos and elements of his recent installation, Heavy as Heaven, created for No Place Gallery, Columbus. A 2017 graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD), Granger has built a repertoire of video work that weaves an ironclad fabric from biography, poetry, and community actions together with arresting images of family and the cities he knows best— Cleveland and Columbus. This Must Be the Place (2019) meditates on Granger’s response to the horror of the 2015 massacre by the white supremacist Dylann Roof at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, during which nine worshippers died. Barack Obama’s eulogy of State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney from that pulpit laid the groundwork for this meditation on the state of grace. His How to Disappear is a short piece screened on a monitor that recounts a worried conversation between Black friends via computer messaging during the peak of racial violence in the media, following the murder of George Floyd. Lastly, scrims with recent still imagery infuse the gallery project space with visual poetry and musicality that runs through all his work.

 

Dominic Palarchio  

Palarchio will be featured concurrently in the FRONT International’s Akron Art Museum installation and at Abattoir this July. In his practice, he uses both found and decommissioned materials from his work as a mechanic in combination with natural elements and industrial byproducts from Detroit’s sprawling landscape. The objects that serve as Palarchio’s readymades are consistent with the unique sense of purpose that they each hold, often combining love and disrepair, utility and decoration. He uses recognizable objects, such as keys, protective goggles, grease-soaked cleaning rags, and an electric meter, as well as rarely seen tools and derivatives of industrial production. His expanded practice focuses on labor, examining it both physically and psychologically.   

Palarchio completed an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2020 with his style already well formed. In addition to the pieces showing in Abattoir’s main gallery space, a neon work by the artist, made from car “underglow” (Untitled, 2020), will hang from the ceiling of the gallery’s project space. This piece nods to the art historical precedents of Arte Povera, and is steeped in the culture and lived realities of America’s working-class.