I’ve been working off and on as a hired gun with the prep team at Museum London for a couple of years now. It’s been one of the more enjoyable and rewarding jobs of the many jobs and endeavours I’ve been doing and not doing and then scrambling to do again ever since moving to Canada. I also get to walk to work, and I consider that walk and any other walk I’m able to take alone these days to be one of the most important ingredients for my psychological and creative survival. It’s about the only time I’m able to coax any words out of my fuzzy old brain, and all the bizarre and miraculous inspirations I could ever possibly want to see in life have always come leaping out at me from the layers of patterns and spectacular happenstances that take place upon the concrete sidewalk in front of me. My phone is crammed full with many thousands of photos of the stuff and any moves I’ve ever made on a canvas are but a feeble attempt to allow and capture something similar to that level of magic. Yeah, I’ll take a few blocks of sidewalk over any gallery any day.
When it comes to art and, well, honestly, pretty much everything else I’ve been involved with my entire life, I’ve always made the joke that I just kind of sort of Forrest Gump-ed my way through it. When I left Oklahoma as a young man, I left with no skills or practical knowledge, nor did I have any desire to acquire any. I was just smart enough to realize how ignorant I was and naive enough to think it didn’t matter. I had looked around at the world and the possibilities of what I might be able to do with myself in it, and all I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with any of it. What was the point of ME trying to contribute anything to it? There were already plenty of people doing everything that needed to be done. But I knew there had to be something else out there; I knew there had to be some other way to be. So I set out on my great, wobbly odyssey to try to find it. Though I was filled to the brim with delusions, I never had any about the potential consequences for living the way I have. And I always had my father back in Oklahoma to remind me in case I ever forgot: “You better pull your head out of your ass, Philby! You gotta get a game plan going or I promise you, you’re going to be &%$#@#! You have zero credibility. You have no skin in the game.” Over the years, the decades, I guess he finally gave up on me ever pulling my head out of my ass. He’d just say, “Well, I hope you know what you’re doing. I hope some day you’re able to pull something off.” Well, you wanna know how old Forrest was when we see him smiling and waving that goofy wave at Lieutenant Dan on top of his very own shrimp boat, after he gets honourably discharged and finally gets a solid path going for himself? Well, I just looked it up. He was 30. 30! I just turned 55.
Now all Forrest Gump jokes aside, when it comes to installing art, I actually do consider myself to be a professional. And on the mornings of any new install, I’ll always turn my back on the words and ignore the concrete vaudeville show, and I’ll spend my walk checking out the artist. This time it’s Amanda McCavour.
I click on a site and the image of a cute, petite, strawberry-haired Amanda pops up, standing in front of her sewing desk, smiling warmly like the kindest Sunday school teacher in a soft cotton dress. On the wall are a few of her lovely embroidered flowers to boot. It all looks so sweet, so innocent. But as you start digging deeper into her work, into her installations, you quickly realize this is in no way just some ornamental craftwork, this is the work of a serious mfkn artist who’s fishing the cold, dark depths of human psychology.
Her Come Up To My Room installation at the Gladstone Hotel, or Stand In For Home from 2009-2010, look like they’ve been hauled up out of the deep seas of the subconscious and got spray cleaned with a power washer for viewing. They could be a set for a David Lynch scene. And if not Lynch, I’d probably go with Trent Reznor to score the music. They give off such a magnificent loneliness, a haunted, almost terrifying feeling of some hallucinatory domestic scene, I instantly think of Louise Bourgeois or Hubert Selby Jr.’s Requiem For A Dream. And imagine sitting there, day after day for hours on end, sewing all this stuff. It’s insane. I can’t wait to meet her.
We get tables set up, put the nicer blankets down, and put out some stanchions. I go and get the scissor lift out. Jamal rolls out the stairs. My boss, Ross (always fun to say), already has the projector rigged and I go up and begin blocking in the circles with tape. We’re told there will be 500 or so panels we have to pin to the wall and float out a bit. Amanda arrives with Cassie Getty, our curator.
Amanda’s even nicer than she seemed in the picture. She lays out all the pieces in stacks that will go with the corresponding circles and then gives us a little demo of how she wants us to pin them to the wall. After coffee, we get her suited up with a hardhat and harness, and her and I go up so she can start taping them to the wall.
Here’s the thing. You can just go on Amanda’s Instagram right now and click on a whole montage of pictures and video clips of the entire thing she posted. It’s all set to a dreamy The War On Drugs song. You’ll see us hammering away. There are some great close-ups of some of her fantastic patterns. You’ll see it all, everything we did. You’ll see me hobble across the frame with my bad back. She captures the whole thing coming together perfectly. And she wrote out a detailed description of exactly how it was all done. But what you won’t see is what actually makes it work. Amanda and I talked about a lot of things up there on the lift. I love hanging out with real deal working artists. They’re like outlaws to me. They give me hope that things are still possible. They’re living their lives by doing it. And they’re always funny and excited about the silliest little things of life. And you get to be there when they make decisions. Which is what it all comes down to really. Now, I’m certainly no authority on art by any measure, although I did go through 1st year art school at age 50 during the pandemic. Haha. It was truly one of the most bizarre and deeply disturbing experiences I’ve ever endured. Comedically, it’s one of my most cherished chapters to look back upon. But I know an artist when I see one. I can just tell by the way they move. There’s something different going on. They’re a bit in between things. Like they’re floating. I guarantee you, you could give those same 500 panels to a 1000 different people and have us at their disposal to pin them up, and they’ll never come close to making that wall come alive like that. There’s a clip I’ve always loved from the 1972 documentary, Painters Painting, where Kenneth Noland explains the phenomenon better than anyone I’ve ever heard, about the artist making these dreamlike decisions. You should watch it if you haven’t. Everyone should. It’s how he says it as much as what he says.
He says:
“There is the best taste.
There’s the right taste.
There’s the real taste.
There’s the real thing.”
Born in Florida and raised in Oklahoma, Phil Bram spent most of his 20s and 30s, traipsing around as a “sometimes successful” fashion model while trying to become a writer or maybe some sort of artist. A self-described factotum, he worked for many years on the small crew during the early days of Dia:Beacon in New York. He’s had many solo art shows, and alongside J.G. Jones, he is the co-creator and writer of the highly acclaimed comic book series, Dust to Dust. It was just released in June as a graphic novel by Image Comics as well as through Delcourt in French. He now lives with his wife, Sarah, and their two boys in London, “hell-bent on creative redemption”.
Amanda McCavour’s Double Shadow is on view at Museum London from May 23, 2026 – March 14, 2027.
Centred is grateful for the support of the London Arts Council in realizing this project.
