Beth Campbell “Multiple singularities.”

Hotel Particulier

poster for Beth Campbell “Multiple singularities.”

This event has ended.

Beth Campbell is known for both her text based drawings, My Potential Future Based on Present Circumstances, and room-filling installations that play with perception by reflecting the simulacra of our mundane everyday environments without the use of a single mirror. This exhibition in the gallery at Hotel Particulier focuses on recent works by Campbell that serve as the antidote to our mass-produced lives. Lamps, sinks and towels – the stuff of modern domestication – that often fade into the background, reduced to their functionality, here take center stage.

Part of an ongoing series, Campbell’s Lamps have a sense of humor and humility in their compromised states. They are not so much defective as perfect in their deformity. Each is immaculately executed with bespoke lampshades custom tailored to fit the position of its matching base. These hand-made works of art are not so much the nomadic objects of most free-standing sculpture, but are rather ready to turn on and light up any room of your house.

While on the Arts/Industry Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in 2010 Campbell worked in the factory and manipulated the castings for a standard bathroom sink so that the ceramic basin slumps and heaves in anything but a neat circle around the drain. Even just these slight alterations to the basic form of the sink create a sense of spatial-temporal displacement so that they seem to quiver under the influence of something like a hang-over. Each Sink is unique and plumbable for use.

In 2011 she was invited to work with the print department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Feeding off of her experimentation with ceramics at Kohler and playing off the tradition of a collagraph, Campbell devised a new way to make a printing plate. Instead of depicting its likeness, she filled a towel with gel medium, shaped it like you would a wet sweater and then let it dry. She used the hardened towel itself as the plate, working with the master printer to push the ink into every stitch and terry loop. The result is a series of prints where the image looks so uncannily real you feel like you could reach right out and touch it.

Beth Campbell, (American, born in Illinois in 1971), received her MFA from Ohio University. In 2007, Campbell exhibited Following Room, a solo project at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has also held solo exhibitions at Manifesta 7; the Public Art Fund; White Columns; the Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY; and Country Club, Los Angeles, CA and Chicago, IL. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, a residency at Kohler Arts Center in 2010, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship in 2009. Her work has additionally been shown at MoMA PS1, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Artists Space. Past works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Campbell currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Media

Schedule

from May 07, 2013 to June 08, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-05-07 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Beth Campbell

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