Cam Scale's State of Mind at Juddy Roller
Sydney trackside graffiti made him; Melbourne gave him a career. In July 2016 Cam Scale opened sixteen portraits about what people think of painted walls.
Cam Scale grew up in Sydney, where the pieces along the railway lines through the suburbs were the first art that really got hold of him. He drew as a small boy, and his parents tried art classes, but the interest only took off at high school. He and a close friend spent their spare time causing trouble, mostly by blowing things up, until they found graffiti. After that, he told the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost in 2016, he was hooked: he tried to keep his marks respectable, but a lot of nights ran into the small hours and a lot of lessons were spent fighting sleep.
From layout to paint
A stint studying graphic design taught him mainly that he wanted to make the images, not arrange them on a page. He spent ten months painting his way round Europe, came home, moved to Melbourne and enrolled in illustration. The city, as he put it, simply had the opportunities and offered a clean start. By mid-2016 he had lived there for nearly ten years and was known both as a graffiti writer and as a painter of very large photorealist walls.
Portraits with a point of view
State of Mind, which opened at Juddy Roller in Melbourne on 8 July 2016, was his first major solo exhibition: sixteen mixed-media works about how people regard graffiti, street art and urban art, and about the overlaps between that world and contemporary art that he felt had not been looked at.
Scale said the concept had changed along the way into something he had expected to attempt later in his career. At first he photographed and painted people he met while working outside, trying to understand what they made of the work. That grew to include other artists, who were invited to contribute to their own portraits so that each picture carried something of the sitter’s hand as well as their likeness. The aim was to show the person and the motive behind the work, not just a face.
Working with Anthony Lister and with Slicer, a fellow Juddy Roller artist, made him look at his own practice afresh and find better ways of working. He wanted the whole range, from celebrated names at the top of the scene to people with good reason to keep their faces covered, and he found the path from an artist’s beginnings to their later work, driven by their own attitude, the most interesting thing of all. Curators, the cleaners who remove work, and the police add a further layer.
He was entertained by a police officer who had recently told national television that graffiti leads to murder. Scale pointed out that he knows a great many writers who went on to all sorts of lives and careers, and had yet to meet a killer among them.
The gallery’s view
Juddy Roller is among the most prominent urban art galleries in Melbourne, and its creative director, Shaun Hossack, said the show brought graffiti and street art together, two practices that are often at odds, and made the case for both. He expected it to be a turning point. Three months shut away in the studio had let Scale go further with his ideas and sharpen his technique considerably, and Hossack predicted that the gain would show once he returned to painting murals.