IDEX
AMBIGUOUS ICONS
Glenn KurtzJim Campbell's Ambiguous Icons
#5 (Running/Falling) (2002) was one of the standouts in the Whitney Museum's
BitStreams exhibition last year. Originally shown at Hosfelt Gallery, the
piece rendered a video of a figure running, stumbling, and falling on a grid
of LED lights. The transfer reduced the figure to a dynamic shadow, seen
against a field of glowing red. Running/Falling may have questioned
the viability of human activity in a digitized world, but it drew its strength
from the tension between an abstract surface and the just recognizable image
this surface implies, literally bringing questions of representation to light.
Hovering between surface and content, Campbell's LED works explore how media
constitute meaning. Campbell's most recent work, on view at Hosfelt, furthered
this exploration. In the series "Motion and Rest" (2002), a central figure
appeared in a matrix of 768 evenly spaced red LED lights. The content of a
these six pieces was an image of a handicapped person walking with a distinctive
gait. The emotional force of this human silhouette emerged once viewers deciphered
the image, but as in Running/Falling, the representation was an effect of
the system. The piece's depth was found on its moving surface, between the
blinking lights. It was here that the viewer engaged the complex, enigmatic
ways that an image is rendered intelligible. The intense highlight of
the show, Church on 5th Avenue (2002), began with another panel of LED lights
- this time white rather than red - through which the artist displayed a
looping video of people entering and exiting a New York church. Instead of
leaving the surface bare, however, Campbell covered it with two sheets of
frosted plexiglas, set at an angle to the lights. The material compounded
content and surface while simultaneously differentiating the degrees of their
relation. Distinct pixels visible on the left gradually coalesced to a misty
glow on the right. The figures, walking between two realms, seemed subject
to a continual process of analogue-digital conversion. The people, as well
as the LED lights, were passing through modes of abstraction.
- Glenn Kurtz, Tema Celeste, May/June 2002, p. 95 <
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