“Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
—Oscar Wilde
Near the midpoint of Cameron’s autobiographical essay New Love, he recalls lying beneath the World Trade Center and watching the shadows change. The essay stops, giving way to the Stranger paintings: shadows cast by chrysanthemums, stenciled in ink and dye on linen. Contours recede as pale residues and gather into dark masses against saturated color. In places, a shadow reads almost as a body. Identically sized paintings are tightly abutted around the room. Shadows cross the seams between paintings, stop at an edge, or return shifted. Light changes; the linen retains the stain—a shadow out of time.
Beyond this room, the gallery narrows. A series of Stars paintings extends across the wall: a continuous burgundy darkness scattered with starlight. Beyond them, the essay resumes in a hospital room, at the threshold of parenthood. From here, it returns to early-aughts New York through remembered voices, rooms, and objects. Memories of art school and the early success of Cameron’s collective—The Bruce High Quality Foundation—overlap with the beginning of his family. “This will be the story now,” Cameron writes. The sentence belongs to the moment at hand and, across the break in the essay, to the exhibition itself. Shadows return; love displaces love, and grief, grief.
