Review – Kristin Cammermeyer’s Sensory Overload at Insert Blanc’s Outside Gallery / CRAVE

Installation shot of Cammermeyer’s exhibition at Outside Gallery.

Kristin Cammermeyer’s show at Insert Blanc Press’ Outside Gallery is a curious combination of kaleidoscopic visions that include hanging ornaments that remind me of non-functional bird cages and windmill parts gone astray. Los Angeles offers its residents the gift of year-long temperate weather, and so Mathew Timmons and his girlfriend Chris Niemi decided to take advantage of that, and position Outside Gallery outside, in the front yard of their home. Artists who show here are welcome to set-up in a way that feels more site-specific installation or public sculpture and less temporary art exhibition. It is as if to say welcome to my home, and also come enjoy the finds of our front yard, which is an art menagerie.

Cammermeyer’s exhibition, which runs through December 11, presents an accumulation of local found-objects-turned-sculptures and two projections — one of the projections is an actual 11-minute video, and the other of multiple changing lights onto highly patterned canvases. Together, the two video projects create an inverse/ reflection effect, which is further complimented by the sculptures in the front yard, which all have faux mirror elements to them. It is as if the sculptures are the slices of patterns from the videos, and the videos flatten the sculptural objects into two-dimensions and then play on infinite repeat. In short, everything appears to be an optical illusion, which means that nothing is what it seems to be. But everything in the show does proudly take up and own the space that it occupies, whether it is contained in a video or the front yard of this home.