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.
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Jim CampbellTransition, 2022custom electronics, 768 LEDs, treated plexiglass23 x 30 x 2 3/4 in
58.4 x 76.2 x 7 cm -
Jim CampbellExploded Flat Grid, 2022custom electronics, 54 LEDs, aluminum26 3/4 x 30 1/4 x 4 1/2 in
67.9 x 76.8 x 11.4 cm -
Jim CampbellRepixelated Grid, 2022custom electronics, 54 LEDs, frosted acrylic, aluminum26 3/4 x 30 1/4 x 5 1/2 in
67.9 x 76.8 x 14 cm -
Jim CampbellExploded Flat Random, 2022custom electronics, 54 LEDs, aluminum26 3/4 x 30 1/4 x 4 1/2 in
67.9 x 76.8 x 11.4 cm -
Jim CampbellRepixelated Random, 2022custom electronics, 54 LEDs, frosted acrylic, aluminum26 3/4 x 30 1/4 x 5 1/2 in
67.9 x 76.8 x 14 cm -
Jim CampbellDrift, 2022custom electronics, 1,728 LEDs, treated plexiglas, Kozo MM-233 x 44 x 2 in
83.8 x 111.8 x 5.1 cm -
Jim CampbellMoving Average #1 (Hitchcock's Psycho), 2022single channel videoduration: 1:46:00
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Jim CampbellMoving Average #3 (Hitchcock's North by Northwest), 2022single channel videoduration: 2:12:26
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Jim CampbellMoving Average #2 (Fellini's 8 1/2), 2022single channel videoduration: 2:15:40
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Jim CampbellMoving Average (Ocean Layers), 2022single channel videoduration: 15:00
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Jim CampbellBuried Thought #2, 2022custom electronics, 600 LEDs, mounted Duratrans and Kozo MM-2 diffusion screen22 5/8 x 33 1/8 x 2 1/4 in
57.5 x 84.1 x 5.7 cm -
Jim CampbellEdition 28 (Surf), 2021custom electronics, 384 LEDs, treated plexiglass15 1/2 x 22 3/4 x 2 7/8 in
39.4 x 57.8 x 7.3 cm -
Jim CampbellAccumulated Psycho, 2004single channel videoduration: 1:46:00