Poltergeist

I went to this exhibit while in LA at the CAA conference and thought it might be of interest. I visited Rebecca's studio while in my last semester at VCFA while she was getting ready to present her studio plan to the gallery and all her installations were in miniature in her studio. The picture to the left, "Gretel" was finished and leaning against the studio wall. It is (and this is a guess) about 9' by 7'. I am sorry that I couldn't post any pics of the installation pieces but you could look at a couple of them on the LA Louver site. She is an amazing painter. But the piece that dominated the show was her black velvet wrapped tree that spread over about half of the main room of the gallery. Rebecca said that the Poltergeist refers to a mischievious spirit, but I did find that it was a little difficult to relate the title of the show to the actual pieces.



Rebecca Campbell
Poltergeist
LA Louver Gallery

26 February - 28 March 2009

Best-known for her bold, representational paintings, in
Poltergeist, Campbell expands her visual vocabulary to includesculpture and video, which she presents in an immersive installation setting.

Poltergeist is an exploration of the connections and
distance between the theoretical and the physical.
Theoretical notions of nostalgia, time and the sublime
are considered through the juxtaposition of materials
that connote particular and disparate time periods and
cultural pedigrees. The works of art become artifacts
of ideas being processed through physical experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs
between these ideas and their practice.

At the entrance of the exhibition the visitor encounters two
closed, large wood doors. Campbell has retrieved the front doors from her childhood home in Salt Lake City, Utah, to serve as a portal into the psychological and visual landscape that lies beyond. The doors are surrounded by hundreds of individual abstract paintings that together convey the bricks of a house.
Crossing the threshold, the visitor is confronted with a large tree that Campbell has harvested from the Los Angeles' neighborhood in which she lives. The leafless, sinuous tree is enrobed in black velvet and sits in a pool of salt crystals, while perched on its limbs rest dozens of glass birds filled with brilliant blue Windex. Beyond the tree, six hundred copper bees (Utah is known as the “beehive” state) comprise the sculpture Satellite. Each bee floats in space, suspended on a thin filament of nickel plated wire affixed to circular walnut panels on the floor and ceiling, to create a shimmering, swirling swarm.

A free-standing arched wall bears one of several paintings inthe exhibition. Entitled Gretel, the painting depicts a young girl with blonde plaits, who crouches by a stream in a wooded landscape. Sunlight dapples the landscape and reflects off the child's golden locks and pale skin. The viewer is drawn into the girl's interior life, through the animation of the landscape that surrounds her: the dense wood canopy is rendered in small, impastoed marks, while broad brush-
strokes convey the ebb and flow of the stream below.
Beneath the painting, on the gallery's floor, a wool shag carpet*, of varying green hues that convey a series of steps, is surrounded by a wood balustrade.

A domestic vignette is presented with a disjointed, destabilized kitchen table and chairs that appear to be partially thrust into the wall. A cake made of glistening chrome seems to slide off the table's surface, in peril of falling ontoa colorful rag rug (that the artist has made from her ownpainting cloths), upon which the table stands. Opposite, a1970s avocado-colored oven, engorged with the books of

Campbell's childhood, is inset into a panel of hand-painted wallpaper while its clock runs backwards in staccato fashion.

Campbell left Utah to study at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, Oregon, receiving her B.F.A. in1994. While continuing to make art, she worked as an independent exhibition curator in Salt Lake City1994 through 1998. In 1998, Campbell received a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and in 1999,
moved to Los Angeles where she earned her MFA from UCLA in 2001. Poltergeist is Campbell's third solo exhibition at L.A. Louver. In addition to Los Angeles, Campbell's paintings have been exhibited inNew York and Basel, Switzerland.

Rebecca's artist statement:

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as a combination of the Greek root nostos meaning "return home" and the Old English genesan meaning "to survive." In my current body of work Poltergeist I explore the often sentimentalized and disregarded significance of this experience. In exploring aspects of childhood, memory, and nostalgia I hope to address nostalgia's disruptive effects on linear time and to propose that this phenomenon might be considered under the rubric of an archetypically feminine sublime, as an underestimated strategy for finding meaning in the face of loss and death. For example when a person is having an acute experience of nostalgia, time collapses and the past, the present and the future become one. A nostalgic moment for me might be triggered by a memory of walking through the forest behind my house when I was five but that memory then triggers others, dancing to Boys Don't Cry while drinking black label beer at the Liberty Park, cutting lavender for the dinner table yesterday afternoon and ultimately a sense of the loss of experiences I have yet to have. Time becomes nonlinear and it's both sad and sweet at the same time. Nostalgia somehow enables us to sing along to the tune of our own deaths.

In this work I'm also concerned with the connections and distance between the theoretical and the physical. Inspired by Barthes premise in Pleasure of the Text that "Whence, perhaps, a means of evaluating the works of our modernity: their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that they always have two edges. The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss." I am creating works that seek out the seam between ideas and their performance. In specific, theoretical notions of nostalgia, time, and the sublime are considered through physical acts of making paintings, installations, sculptures and films creating documents of these connections and distances. The works of art become artifacts of ideas being processed through experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs between these ideas and their practice.

Practically speaking, I circumscribe "the midst of bliss" by choosing signs, materials and techniques that give forms to the premise. One notion I am interested in is landscape. The sign I have chosen to represent this with is the tree. Perspectives on nature, wildness and space are examined by animating the tree in various media and interpretive techniques including monumental gestural painting, documentary film footage and life size sculptural construction. The content also unfolds through investment in metaphoric materials. My interest in the nostalgia's transgressive effect on linear time is expressed through the juxtaposition of materials that connote particular and disparate time periods and cultural pedigrees. These materials include, oil paint on canvas, bronze, copper, shag carpet, acrylic paint on drywall, velvet, glass, Windex, etc. The amalgam of these textures allows me to embody my ideas about time without reducing them to a didactic argument. The resonance is one faceted with the familiarity of the body and the fiction of the mind. Marguerite Duras describes these phenomena as "Dreams of another time when the same thing that is going to happen would happen differently. In another way. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands of others who, like ourselves, dream of this time, necessarily. This dream contaminates me."

Rebecca Campbell