Cameron Patricia Downey: ‘Orchid Blues’ at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Cameron Patricia Downey: Orchid Blues had its opening reception at Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) on Sunday, September 17, and the Independent’s photographer Ingrid Bostrom was there to capture the festivities. 

The new exhibition features sculpture, installation, photography, and a new video, with pointed references to blues traditions and the quotidian. An anti-disciplinary artist and environmental scientist from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Downey mediates concepts and bounds of world-building and survival artistry by way of Black, fantastical, and precarious spaces and forms that include sculpture, film, photography, the written, and the performed. Downey’s Orchid Blues crosses, circles around, and dwells in found, amassed, and preserved objects — known to be personally and communally dear.

Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science. Their art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; and M+B Gallery, Los Angeles. They are the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize, and are currently in residence with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department.

MCASB’s gallery hours are Tuesday–Sunday, 11 a.m.–6 p.m. each day. For more information, see mcasantabarbara.org.