Cameron Granger, “1st Movement— Cartography Catastrophe” (2022), silkscreen on paper with pen, 22 x 30 inches (~55.9 x 76.2 cm) (picture by Jake Heller; all pictures courtesy the artist)
It’s becoming that Cameron Granger was born and raised in Euclid, Ohio, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland named for the Historical Greek father of geometry, as a result of the artist is focused on strains above all — strains seen and hidden, ancestral strains, and the angular, summary sketchings of maps and concrete planning. Granger can also be a gamer, as soon as a Ps child immersed in role-playing titles like Ultimate Fantasy (1987–ongoing) and Breath of Fireplace (1993–ongoing), now an admirer of speedrunners who whip via a recreation with blazing effectivity. As a toddler, he spent numerous hours at his grandparents’ home, watching his grandmother clear up her day by day crossword, centered on her as she centered on the lineated black-and-white grid.
Granger’s sequence Actions (all 2024), on view in his exhibition 9999 on the Queens Museum, is an homage to his grandmother’s ritual of puzzle-solving. Every silkscreen work incorporates a crossword, the squares of this one crammed with crimson pen, that one with blue, recalling the best way a busy particular person may seize no matter device obtainable — it being the ritual, not the implement, that’s valuable. Beneath every grid is much less a set of discrete clues than an interconnected poem: The place a crossword clue usually opts for concision, and prods after some ill-formed blob of “common knowledge,” Granger’s clues overflow with emotion and private historical past, asserting the worthiness of his grandma’s place within the puzzle’s cultural canon. She is usually the clue’s referent, and the topic of its reverence: In “3rd Movement – Her Archive,” as an example, the reply to a sure clue — “It was blue, and covered in flowers. You massage her aching hands and tell her how pretty she looks in it. She doesn’t believe you” — is “DRESS.”
Cameron Granger, “3rd Movement— Her Archive”
(2022), silkscreen on paper with pen, 22 x 24 inches (~55.9 x 61 cm) (picture by Kris Graves, all photographs courtesy the artist)
A straight line connects the private and the political in Granger’s work as properly — the strains of the crossword grid, zoomed out a bit, are much less a floorplan than a metropolis map. The artist got here of age in Columbus, observing the results of metropolis planning techniques wielded in opposition to poor Black residents. Within the Sixties, within the wake of the Federal-Assist Freeway Act of 1956, development of the I-71 razed a traditionally Black neighborhood, chopping it off from the remainder of town. Those that may afford to left, and wealth drained slowly from the group. Grocery shops closed, colleges obtained worse, property values plummeted, and public works tasks disappeared.
Thus, in “1st Movement – Cartography Catastrophe,” the reply to the clue “Here, they constrict like throats. Messy lines that move us” is “INTERSTATE.” And such city dislocation is mirrored by the rogue metropolis planning of the crossword grid. A black sq. may forestall two phrases from crossing; a grid may flout the style solely and have no intersecting phrases in any respect, simply segregated islands of linguistic isolates.
Certainly, the unfavorable picture of the relentless game-players Granger admires is the single-minded, iron-fisted bureaucrat — the Robert Moses-type whose invisible hand can cut up the ocean of a group, whose affect can appear if not biblical, then darkly conspiratorial. Video games and concrete planning, that’s to say, are each about company. In Video games: Company as Artwork (2020), the thinker C. Thi Nguyen departs from the normal analytic framework of evaluating video games to different mediums — praising a online game’s plot as “novelistic,” hailing its graphics as movie-like — and focuses as an alternative, in an strategy that fashions that of thinker John Dewey, on the medium-specific expertise of gameplay. In Nguyen’s telling, the true forbears of recreation designers aren’t writers or filmmakers, however course of artists and concrete planners. They try to “cope [with] and corral the agency of users, to achieve certain effects,” Nguyen writes. “Games are an artistic cousin to cities and governments.”
Cameron Granger, “4th Movement— Common American Bond” (2022), silkscreen on paper with pen, 22 x 24 inches (~55.9 x 61 cm) (picture by Kris Graves)
Granger’s refusal of the crossword grid’s conventions is thus additionally a refusal to just accept the city grid, and the constraints on company it imposes. The crossword is ephemeral — solved after which discarded — however every of Granger’s framed puzzles arrives as a preserved, deliberate artifact. The dictionary overtness of ordinary clues is refused in favor of an obscure poetry that makes the viewer-solver work even tougher, functioning as a type of redaction. Ultimately, he refuses the very thought {that a} puzzle has an answer in any respect. A few of the clues don’t counsel a transparent reply, and the place there are solutions, some are crossed out in a type of marking analogous to graffiti on a shiny new high-rise: illegible to the luxurious builders who constructed it, however filled with which means to the group displaced by it.
Granger refers to this suite of refusals as “modding,” after the follow of modifying the look or mechanics of a online game, a cognate to the ways in which low-income Black and Brown communities engineer their very own methods of thriving inside techniques not constructed for them. In “4th Movement – Common American Bond,” 2-Down’s clue reads: “There ain’t no map that can take you here. It’s the arms length between you and your brother on the dance floor. It’s the tiny gaps between you and your lover’s skin when you fall into each other in the night. It’s the distance traveled between the plate & your mouth when your grandma makes your favorite meal.” The reply within the grid is crossed out. Trying carefully, the letters behind the strains appear to be they spell HEAVEN, but it surely’s unimaginable to inform.
Cameron A. Granger: 9999 continues on the Queens Museum (Flushing Meadows, Corona Park, Queens) via January 19. The exhibition was curated by Sarah Cho.
