NYAB Event - Jim Campbell “New Work”

Jim Campbell “New Work”

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery

This event has ended.

A former filmmaker, Campbell moved to interactive video installations in the mid-1980s and has been working with LEDs – light emitting diodes – since 1999. His investigations with LED technology have produced immersive, illuminated, sculptural environments that vividly record and recalibrate the presence of time in relation to light, space, and the human condition. Simultaneously shifting the viewer’s perception through works that synthesize acts of observation, reflection, and engagement in an all-encompassing pictorial realm, Campbell deconstructs these grand optical illusions by revealing the mechanisms at play.

In three separate series on view at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery: Topographies, Reconstructions, and Home Movies, the artist continues to challenge notions of image making and the experience of viewing by injecting color (an element rarely used before) into his illuminated palette. The exhibition includes panel projections comprising hundreds of LEDs strung from ceiling to floor in a grid that transmit low-resolution imagery distilled from found Kodachrome home movies; wall-mounted pieces, or topographies, composed of individually-scaled LEDs that comprise a gradient picture plane; and a series of four color LED-based bas reliefs, whose transparent, molded, resin front pieces act as both surface and content.

While his earlier LED-based transformative works – primarily featuring pixilated views of fleeting activity or quotidian events – relied on video as content, Campbell’s focus has recently turned more towards materiality and process. The new works “hover on the edge of abstraction, re-abstraction and representation,” says Campbell, and investigate how perception, as a visceral phenomenon of time and memory, can be altered, filtered, or manifested through the layering of media.