Kent Fine Arts' fall exhibition, on view September 25 through November 14, gathers work by Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel—an artist who spent decades avoiding the commercial gallery world entirely after a 1957 show got shut down by police.
Kent Fine Art, the gallery at 2854 Church Street in Pine Plains, opens "Cameron (1922–1995)" on September 25, running through November 14 and open to visitors Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 5pm. The show gathers paintings and drawings by an artist who spent most of her career actively avoiding critical attention.
Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, who worked under the single name Cameron, was born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, served in the Navy during World War II, and settled afterward in Pasadena, where she met Jack Parsons, a co-founder of Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Parsons was also a follower of Thelema, the occult movement founded by Aleister Crowley, and in 1946 he and a young L. Ron Hubbard conducted a series of rituals known as the Babalon Working, intended to invoke a mystical "elemental woman."
Cameron arrived at a party at Parsons' house not long after, and he came to believe she was the very presence the rituals had summoned. Cameron and Parson's married later that year. Parsons died in an explosion at their home in 1952. Cameron, suspecting he had been killed deliberately, spent the following years performing rituals aimed at contacting his spirit, and for a time led a small occult group in Beaumont, California, called The Children.
On top of her charged existance Cameron was also been a skilled draftsman, working in ink, gouache, and casein to produce dense, mythic figures and landscapes that art writers have since compared to Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky's turn toward the spiritual in abstraction. In 1957, a drawing of hers called "Peyote Vision," made after her first experience with the drug, was included in a group show at Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery. The LAPD raided the gallery and shut the exhibition down, calling the drawing obscene. Cameron responded by destroying much of her own output and largely refused to show her work commercially for the rest of her life, giving pieces away to friends instead.
She wasn't only a visual artist. Cameron played "the Scarlet Woman," opposite Anaïs Nin, in Kenneth Anger's 1956 film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, and appeared alongside Dennis Hopper in Curtis Harrington's Night Tide in 1961; Harrington had already made a short film about her, The Wormwood Star, in 1955. She moved in the same Los Angeles circle as the assemblage artist Wallace Berman, who published her work in his journal Semina in 1955, and George Herms. By her own account and others', she treated all of it—painting, ritual, performance—as versions of the same practice.
Cameron's posthumous reputation has grown since her death from cancer in 1995. The Museum of Contemporary Art's Pacific Design Center staged a major retrospective, "Cameron: Songs for the Witch Woman," in 2014, which traveled the following year to Jeffrey Deitch's former gallery space in Manhattan with roughly 60 works. Her drawings have since appeared in the traveling museum show "Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle," and this year alone her work is included in "A Queer Arcana: Art, Magic, and Spirit" at the Palm Springs Art Museum, running through October.
The show at Kent Fine art is a rare oppertunity to get a glimpse at this esoteric, still widely censored work. Gallery hours outside the Saturday and Sunday viewing window are by appointment. Inquiries go to gallery director Douglas Walla.
Kent Fine Art, 2854 Church Street, Pine Plains, NY: Cameron (1922–1995), September 25–November 14, Saturdays and Sundays, 11am–5pm.
