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16/11/2003

Cameron Jamie

Foundation for Art and Creative Technology - FACT, Liverpool

Spook House, Kranky Klaus, BB

Three films accompanied by live soundtrack music by The Melvins
An Artangel Commission

Directed by Cameron Jamie and co-produced with Artangel

All of my projects, whether documentary, fiction, or whatever, are all somehow linked and connected like little planets to one another. Some artists create worlds that they want to exist. Inside my world everything seems to be dead and brought back to life in a zombie-like state.
Cameron Jamie, 2003*

American artist and filmmaker Cameron Jamie's investigations into violent suburban rituals are revealed in his new films Spook House and Kranky Klaus - urgent, unaffected and alarming journeys into the heart of vernacular culture. Spook House and Kranky Klaus will be screened with Jamie's earlier film, BB, and accompanied by specially created live soundtrack music from legendary US rock band, The Melvins.

Every October, before Halloween, people throughout the US transform the interiors and exteriors of their homes or take over abandoned structures to create spook houses. Amidst banal rows of houses, home-grown installations emerge. Front lawns become cemeteries, kitchens become mausoleums and dismembered x{2018}bodies' are prepared for cannibal feasts. Filmed in the white working-class suburbs of Detroit, Spook House is part-performance, part-entertainment, a community grand guignol serving as a clandestine theatrical outlet for pathological expressions of fear, horror and death at the margins of American culture.

In Jamie's second new film, Kranky Klaus, something even stranger is going on. In the snowbound villages of central Austria, on 6 December every year, villagers congregate in homes to await a visit by a benign St Nicholas bearing seasonal gifts. They are also waiting for the Krampus, a strange mythical beast with huge horns and shaggy coats and serious attitude. As St Nicholas rewards the good, so the Krampus punish the bad, overturning tables, mauling parents and menacing children to the very limits of acceptable intimidation.

Accompanying Spook House (2003) and Kranky Klaus (2003), is the UK premiere of BB (1998-2000), Jamie's acclaimed earlier film. Since 1998, he has been documenting suburban LA teenagers creating their own backyard wrestling events. Kids fly through the air, jump from the tops of garages, slam and smash each other with chairs and ladders. It is never clear whether they are playing for fun or doing it for real. The combination of slow-motion black and white Super 8 images with the dark pounding soundtrack exudes a feeling of brooding aggression, reinforcing what Jamie calls 'a purgatory state of being'.

Formed in 1984, the highly influential band, The Melvins, are considered to be the founding fathers of grunge. Their music has a slow, ominous and claustrophobic intensity, based on the minutiae of song construction, repetition and dramatic emphasis.

UK tour dates and venues: FACT, Liverpool (17 November); Norwich School of Art (18 November); Mead Gallery, Birmingham (19 November); MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (20 November); Turner Simms Concert Hall (21 November); Spacex, Exeter (23 November); Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton (26 November); IVC, Cambridge (25 November) and The Forum, London (28 November).

For further information and images please contact:
Janette Scott
Press and Publicity Associate
Artangel
31 Eyre Street Hill
London EC1R 5EW
T: 020 7713 1400

Notes
1. Cameron Jamie* Extract from an interview with Jens Hoffmann, Flash Art, March/April 2003.
2. Cameron Jamie was born in Los Angeles in 1969. He lives and works in Paris. Selected solo shows: 2003: Christine König, Vienna; 2002, Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, Centre National de l'Estampe et de l'Art Imprime, Chatou (France); 2000: OK Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz; 1999: Praz-Delavallade, Paris. Selected group shows: 2002, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; 2001, Exploding Cinema, Rotterdam Film Festival; 2000, Presumed Innocent, Musee d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux.
3. The Melvins have been highly influential for some of the most pivotal musicians and bands of the last two decades of rock music including Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. They have produced 18 albums, toured with Mudhoney, Kiss, Nine Inch Nails, Primus and Mike Patton (Faith No More).
4. Artangel has pioneered new ways of collaborating with artists and engaging audiences in an ambitious series of highly successful commissions since the early 1990s. By producing the best art, in the best possible conditions, Artangel has become a central part of the cultural debate, both in the UK and abroad. For further information see http://www.artangel.org.uk Artangel gratefully acknowledge the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for supporting the research and development of Artangel's programme of commissions. Artangel is supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Company of Angels.

FACT
88 Wood Street - L1 4DQ
Liverpool

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