CAMEO OXILIA MILANO

Lorenzo Medici self-inscribed pieces from his collection of ancient cameos with his own latin initials - wanting for an association to their Graeco-Roman glamours. The lot was acquired by the Medici from the estate of Pope Paul II who at the time of his death had amounted the largest assemblage of the mysterious precious objects, so inspired was he by the fashionable faces from mythology. In the process of rehousing the personal adornments, or ‘rehabilitating’ the stones in reliquary display, their associations that once projected the wearers’ virtuous devotion to a certain mythological god became christianized. And in the process of augmentation, their mythic truths were lost, as their meaning became moralized for the oligarchy.
The evolution of this cleansing presents itself in modern funerary practice. The cameo is seen at last as accessorized decoration to graves in the form of oval framed photographs or drawings mounted on stone.
The appearance of a modern cameo, a snapshot of the human gaze, as a momentous, ostentatious, ever-present object is something nobody hates and is evidence of the lost characters’ dignity, simply by being recorded with moral prestige in cameo.
Totems to the dead and lost achieve a certain symbolic status in time, becoming accessories to the emotional spaces created in grief, engraved by loss, as seals to memorial time capsules. Public and private grief are two rituals linked in an exit, however differentiated by the mourners’ personal need or social expectation to react through various emotional responses. We emote and we collect. We act and we react.
Neo-mythological storylines recall the virus-panicked burning of personal possessions belonging to those befallen to early AIDS - a vilified lot - left alone to their debilitating ends. Jobriaths’ late musical legacy is lost to us along with his grand piano - once titillating ears from the roof of the Chelsea Hotel. Sexually ambiguous melodies have become lost to our senses in the process of editing the collections of life’s leftovers.
The epic archiving by Greg Ellis, or @Ward5b exemplifies the layers of connective, collective traumas, encapsulating a greater detail of the plagued landscape at the onset of the AIDS catastrophe. In an urgent and instinctual state of grief - alive in the throws of the virus - He collected and archived in various forms made accessible with an intense surrender to cause, with great generosity to his audience. Without vaults like Ward5b’s we receive an edited and generic portrayal, often romanticized or fetishized in the creative output of the long-dead made thinly visible through the hyper-connected digital diasporas, rather than in the actions of those in high-risk of disappearance at life, who live in moral question.
Klaus Jürgen Schmidt - Athens - January 2020