When God or whoever is out there made Detroiters, they sprinkled ingenuity on top of heaping amounts of creativity, grit, and talent. Our city is abundant with artists who fuel the city’s creative undertow, from painters to poets and performance artists and everything in between.
This revitalized Metro Times feature will highlight a different artist each week. Got someone in mind you think deserves the spotlight? Hit us up at [email protected].
Artist of the week: Cydney Camp
Cydney Camp is a relative newcomer to Detroit’s art scene, but she knows exactly what she’s doing.
The 28-year-old artist is working on her master’s degree in painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Despite sketching most of her life, Camp started painting in 2017 and was mostly self-taught until deciding to take a few art classes and eventually work toward her master’s. Before pursuing her passion as a full-time artist, she was working in project management, which she still occasionally freelances for on the side.
Her still-life paintings in muted pastel earth tones often feature subjects with distorted disproportions. A woman faces away from the viewer with exaggerated back muscles bulging off the canvas in one piece. Another features a woman with one eye turned sideways, while yet another has an oversized leg.
Nothing about Camp’s paintings is perfect, but there’s nothing picture-perfect about the human experience, either. Artists can take the liberty of creating something beautiful and aesthetically pleasing on canvas, but it doesn’t always reflect the messy and sometimes down-right fucked up journey of life we’re all on.
Camp’s figurative paintings do reflect this, while incorporating elements of the abstract along the way.
Camp, who was born in Detroit and now lives in Hamtramck, has shown her work at venues like Norwest Gallery, Ann Arbor Art Center, Detroit Fiber Works, and M Contemporary Art, where she’s exhibiting her latest body of work.
In the M Contemporary Art show called Passages, Camp debuts a series of self-portraits interspersed with paintings of green landscapes and colorful flowers. The mixed-media collection sees the artist draw from all the tools in her toolbox, including oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, and swatches of fabric that add texture to her cool-toned color palette.
Where to see her work: Passages is on view at M Contemporary Art until Dec. 17; 205 E. Nine Mile Rd., Ferndale; 347-665-7011; mcontemporaryart.com.
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