New York, Jim Campbell

RN New York Reviews Jun 2014_Layout 1 5/5/14 4:47 PM Page 6 reviews: new york DVD player. The slides are blank, and Jim Campbell the viewer could only perceive snippets Museum of the Moving Image and Bryce of a slippery narrative for a magical split Wolkowitz second as the next slide cascaded into its The third-floor gallery at the Museum of place. the Moving Image contained the first Campbell’s works examine the very New York museum survey of the work of act of seeing as it relates to emotion and Jim Campbell, created over the course of intellect—and everything in between. A 29 years. In the darkened space, the faint concurrent show at Bryce Wolkowitz hum of motors—music to the ears of film consisted of some half-dozen light buffs—created an immersive experience. works by the artist, who was a former Campbell’s clever experimentation with filmmaker. LEDs were used to make top- film and new media produced haunting, ographical reliefs for distilled home hazy, handsome works that often ap- movies and projections. Visitors’ eyes peared to have sprung from the mind of were challenged and stimulated by the a mad scientist, a quirky but poetic one. massive chandelier of light that hung Visual artworks on display—part from the ceiling for Untitled (Study for painting, part photography, part sculp- the Journey), 2014. As images of blurred ture, part video—were tinged with the commuters made their way across the autobiographical as well as universal overhead lights, Campbell’s technology themes such as loss, memory, and the managed to evoke impressions of what vagaries of perception. it means to be human. In Photo of My Mother (1996), an —Doug McClemont image of the artist’s mother became visi- ble behind clouded glass, but only Leon Kelly, Untitled, 1958, pencil on paper, within the timed intervals of a recording Leon Kelly 1 61 ⁄2" x 36". Francis M. Naumann Fine Art. of Campbell’s steady breathing. Next to Francis M. Naumann Fine Art that picture hung Portrait of My Father Leon Kelly (1901–82) was a Surrealist the shell of a turtle. No matter what the (1994-95), a companion photo- and painter from Philadelphia who showed at primordial fantasy, Kelly’s drawings, electricity-based work controlled by the New York’s Julien Levy Gallery in the which merge Old Master techniques with timing of the artist’s heartbeat. 1940s along with Max Ernst, Yves Tan- a modernist sensibility, are nuanced and Ambiguous Icon #1 Running Falling guy, Roberto Matta, and Salvador Dalí. strangely beautiful. (2000) depicted a filmic image from a Like Dalí, Kelly was fascinated with dis- This lovingly curated show followed grid of 165 red LED lights that could be torted and dismembered body parts, a Kelly’s development as a master drafts- seen best when viewed through a motif that became one of the signatures man from his student years at the Penn- clouded glass panel. Campbell has also of Surrealism. But the textures of Kelly’s sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to his been fascinated with obsolete technol- work are, for the most part, closer to sojourn in Paris and through his later ogy, as demonstrated in a kinetic 2007 Matta’s. decades, when he worked—in hermetic work, titled Glimpse, which consists of a In addition to paintings, Kelly pro- seclusion—on Long Beach Island in New slide projector mysteriously rigged to a duced works on paper that are as re- Jersey. At the start, Kelly produced deft markable for takes on the art of the day—Cubism and their drafts- Synchromism in the 1920s and social re- manship as alism in the ’30s. By the ’40s he had for the dis- found his métier as scenographer of the turbing con- weird. His human figures became elon- tent. In one gated and skeletal until they resembled piece in the the birds and insects he had always loved show, a to draw. meticulously As the decades passed, the animal, rendered vegetable, and mineral worlds seemed to monstrous subsume the human. A drawing called bird tortures Boy Holding an Oursin (1953) looks like a a naked tangle of praying mantises. Several works woman. In from the late ’50s and the ’60s, in which another, an bony figures stroll on the beach, pose a avian head consuming question: Who are we as hu- and pair of mans, and how are we different from outstretched mere matter? It’s a puzzle that artists Jim Campbell, Portrait of Rebecca with Power Line Fluctuations, 1992, talons from Albrecht Dürer to Francis Bacon video monitor and custom electronics, 24" x 18" x 18". Museum of the Moving Image. emerge from have struggled with. —Mona Molarsky BOTTOM: SARAH CHRISTIANSON/COLLECTION RENA BRANSTEN 98 June 2014 ARTnews.

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