Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Jim Campbell from March 7 - April 19, 2014. The show will focus on the pioneering artist's most recent series of sculptural light installations. A consummate innovator, Campbell is considered one of the leading artists working today in the field of new media.
The exhibition coincides with Jim Campbell's first New York museum retrospective. Organized by the Museum of the Moving Image, Jim Campbell: Rhythms of Perception, on view from March 21–June 15, 2014, features more than twenty works.
In addition, New York's Joyce Theater will present Constellation, a collaboration between Alonzo King LINES Ballet and Jim Campbell, from March 18 - 23, 2014. The performance will feature an installation comprised of 1,000 light spheres programmed in synchronized interplay with the dancers.
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 form a grid that transmits 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.