Jim Campbell: New Work

Jim Campbell makes innovative works that have set standards for art made with technology for more than twenty years. Campbell’s media and message are inseparable. He uses technologies developed for information transfer and storage to explore human perception, memory and the ways we measure time.

In signature works, pixilated representations involving grids of L.E.D.s have such low perceived resolution as to defy comprehension. Through these Campbell plumbs the human ability to interpret abstract information and “fill in the gaps” necessary to create a complete idea. His exploration of the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation is a metaphor for the human talent for poetic understanding or “knowledge” as opposed to the mathematics of “data.”

His seventh solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery will include an “exploded” L.E.D. work – the precursor to a piece that will be exhibited in the atrium of SFMoMA in 2011 – in which the lighted pixels creating imagery are arranged in three-dimensional space rather than on a flat plane. Campbell will also create a large-scale piece in which the pixels are turned away from the viewer to reflect off the wall, and several works in which still photographic images are combined with time-based imagery.

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. He transitioned from filmmaking to interactive video installations in the mid-1980s and has been working with L.E.D. technology since 1999. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally and is in the collections of MoMA, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many others. Beginning in October 2010, a large-scale outdoor piece will be exhibited in Madison Square Park in Manhattan.