Jim Campbell: Wandering

For nearly three decades, Jim Campbell has designed and built custom electronics, hijacking tech developed for information transfer and storage and repurposing it to make artworks that explore the limits of human perception.

The pieces in this show of new work should, in theory, defy comprehension. They are either so low resolution (too little information) or so high resolution (too much information) that the viewer should be completely confounded.  But Campbell plumbs our primal ability to subconsciously interpret information and "fill in the gaps" necessary for us to identify objects and create a complete concept.  His exploration of the distinction between the analogue world and its digital representation is a metaphor for the difference between poetic understanding or "knowledge" versus the mathematics of "data." 

Through constantly-evolving experimentation, Campbell parses one of the most fundamental questions about the human mind: what enables us to interpret and understand the world around us?

Opening reception for the artist:  Saturday May 7, 3 - 5 pm

Jim Campbell's work has been exhibited internationally and in America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Museum.  Honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. He has two Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT and as an engineer holds nearly twenty patents in the field of video image processing. His 2018 piece, Day for Night, is a permanent LED installation that comprises the top nine floors of the 61-story Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.