NYAB Event - Jennifer R.A. Campbell "And So The Story Goes"

Jennifer R.A. Campbell "And So The Story Goes"

Blank Space

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Creating her own symbols through carefully articulated details in each piece, she presents individuals whose identities are suggested by their attributes. Campbell's interpretations empower each element to live only for the story that she wants to tell. Playing with stereotypical or "stock" characters, they become symbols themselves. In her words, they are "carriers of meaning through their relationship to material culture and their interaction with each other." Without text to stabilize how images should be interpreted, the meaning is indeterminate and fluid !) subject to multiple interpretations.

Using crisp lines, bold colors, and the shallow surfaces of advertising and poster art, Campbell concentrates on the surface details of the figures. Focusing more on the process of expressing these concepts rather than the linguistic elements of storytelling. The artist builds up layers of thin glazes of oil paint to accentuate the artifice of the images, and in this way her figures occupy "simulated spaces", like actors in a studio.

An example of this artifice is "Min and Bill"; the portrait of a couple at the margins of society as evident from their attributes (make up, hair, clothes) who are role-playing "summer love". The surrounding dreamlike scenery includes symbols that equally add to various, possible interpretations. In "Remember My Forgotten Man" and "Love and Human Remains" there is the continuation of this narrative of symbols. Thematic "love" includes visions of both beauty and destruction presented in uncertain ways that leave their meaning fluid. In all of Campbell's exhibition paintings, what is most powerfully "told" is what is not said at all. She gives only suggestions that draw out meaning from each viewer personally.