Crashing Tables

source: bethcampbellstudio

Known for her drawings, sculpture, and architectural interventions, Beth Campbell creates works that challenge the notion of a physical world beyond our perception. Drawing upon philosophy, phenomenology and psychology, Campbell choreographs spaces, crafts uncanny objects, and maps thought.

In Campbell’s installations and recent sculpture, what appears at first glance to be a facsimile of the everyday will reveal startling complexity: Forms repeat and stutter. Mirrors become portals. Interiority is externalized. The familiar becomes strange. Precisely staged tableaux such as Following Room (2007) confound viewers’ expectations through the careful orchestration of repetition and difference. With works such as Elsewhere (2010) or the Lamps series (2010-ongoing), Campbell collapses the distance between a recognizable world of banal objects and a multiplicity of alternate realities.

Beginning in 1998 the diagrammatic Potential Future Drawings embody Campbell’s interest in giving physical shape to streams of consciousness; each drawing branches out from a single occurrence in her everyday life into a host of outcomes ranging from fantastic to abysmal. The highly subjective, personal voice behind Campbell’s text departs from the taut vocabulary of conceptual art while appropriating its tropes.

Campbell’s mobiles manifest a similar interest in parallel realities. Conceived as ‘drawings in space,’ their abstract forms of bent steel and wire evoke Freud’s neurological diagrams, trees, and circulatory systems, while also serving as speculative visualizations of possibility. The interplay of lines creates an optical interference effect similar to moiré patterns, causing the surrounding space to vibrate and seemingly shift. This visual contrast catalyzes the tension between physical and virtual, ordinary and surreal.

Campbell’s commissioned projects include Following Room at the Whitney Museum of Art (2007) and Following Room (Trento) at Manifesta 7, Trento, Italy (2008); Potential Store Fronts for the Public Art Fund, New York (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include Seomi Gallery, South Korea; Country Club, Chicago; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland OH; Country Club Projects at the Buck House, Los Angeles, and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. Other museum exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Greater New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, White Columns, the Drawing Room, London, and the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs NY. Her work is included in collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Memorial Fellowship (2009); and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2006). She has been an artist-in-residence at John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2009); the Lower East Side Printshop (2006); and Dieu Donné (2003), among others. Campbell was born in 1971 in Illinois; she lives and works in New York.
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source: fundacaobienalartbr

Beth Campbell nasceu no estado de Illinois, EUA, em 1971. Graduou-se como Bacharel em Belas-Artes pela Truman State University, Missouri, em 1993 e obteve seu Mestrado em Belas Artes em 1997, pela Universidade de Ohio, em Athens, EUA. No mesmo ano, cursou a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, em Skowhegan, Maine. Atualmente, vive e trabalha em Nova York. Algumas de suas exposições individuais nos Estados Unidos foram: Potential Store Fronts, Public Art Fund, Nova York (2007); How Did We End Up Here?, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Nova York (2005); Make Belief, Sala Diaz, San Antonio, Texas (2005); Statements, Art Basel, Miami Beach, Flórida (2004); Every other day, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio (2004); Same As Me, Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, Califórnia (2003). Suas coletivas mais recentes: Text Formed Drawing, The Contemporary Art Galleries, University of Connecticut; Past Imperfect: Future Tense, New Center for Contemporary Art, Louisville, Kentucky; Personal Geographie, Hunter College, Nova York; Timed Based Art Festival, PICA, Portland, Oregon; e Therefore I am, Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, Nova York; todos em 2006. O trabalho de Campbell está representado em muitas coleções, incluindo: The Museum of Modern Art, Nova York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, Nova York; e The New School, também em Nova York.