SOLOMON KAMMER

In Give it up, Kammer presents a new suite of paintings that continues their examination and research of transcending confines of the physical body. These informed works celebrate neurodiversity and all forms of disability that translate onto their canvases into a visual language that advertently defies categorization.

Kammer started out with exposing the gory truths of endometriosis and their lengthy pursuit for accurate diagnoses for fibromyalgia while facing subsequent abuses from that journey, to capturing their recent illuminating discovery of being medically diagnosed with Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Demystifying and unmasking the medicalization and typecasting of the female anatomy, their painted compositions allow the canvases to be sites of spectacle and introspection. In doing so, they investigate the very notion of bodies as thresholds of experience.

Kammer favours sharp contours and contrast through the sure strokes of their brushes that transmute their emotional states and personal experiences into corporeal forms. In their large-scale work Subject, Kammer paints their friend and fellow disability advocate, Jamila Main, laid on a clinical yet altar-like table. Here, the figure is transformed into a medical specimen in which their individuality has been stripped away by their clothes as onlookers gawk at their naked yet defiant form. Give it up celebrates bodily autonomy and reveals the subliminal shared experiences of women and gender minorities who have been forced to live lives of constant scrutiny, coercion, mistreatment and misdiagnosis.