WANDERING with Jim Campbell

Transition, 2022, custom electronics, 768 LEDs, treated Plexiglass, 23 x 30 x 2 3/4 inches

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.

Jim Campbell: Wandering installation view

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.

Drift, 2022, custom electronics, 1,728 LEDs, treated Plexiglas, Kozo MM-2, 33 x 44 x 2 inches

But Campbell plumbs our primal ability to subconsciously interpret sensory data, either "filling in the gaps" or sorting through extraneous noise in order to identify objects and formulate a coherent concept.

Exploded Flat Random, 2022, custom electronics, 54 LEDs, aluminum, 26 3/4 x 30 1/4 x 4 1/2 inches

Campbell's 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."

Moving Average #3 (Hitchcock's North by Northwest), 2022, single channel video, duration: 2:12:26

In a mesmerizing new series he calls Moving Average, Campbell explores these ideas in works that are essentially the opposite of his LED pieces.

Moving Average #2 (Fellini's 8 1/2), 2022, single channel video, duration: 2:15:40

Using video and movie footage, he constructs between 5 and 18 layers of moving imagery which are overlaid and played simultaneously. If his low-resolution LED works are about the minimum threshold of information necessary to create meaning, his Moving Average works are about the maximum — how much he can pile on before we're unable to make sense of anything at all.

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?

Jim Campbell: Wandering installation view

Click here for a deeper dive into all the works in the exhibition.
Wandering is on view through June 11.

Recent Press

The best of Campbell’s recent video sculptures, “Drift,” 2022, almost has the appearance of a charcoal drawing. A grid of LEDs illuminates a pane of frosted glass from behind, casting an iridescent, unfocused image on the hazy screen. It’s so diffuse, it’s difficult to make out what the footage shows... Once you put it together the dreamy visual feels like looking at a memory. — Max Blue

LET THERE BE LIGHT
by Steve Seid

Yesterday, I went to the Hosfelt Gallery to see the newest work by Jim Campbell. You know, the artist with bragging rights for the highest permanent digital art display—atop the Salesforce 'scraper—seen for tens of miles around. I've long been fascinated by Jim's pursuit to visualize what dares to break with the visual. His images are not so much about abstraction, though that rides along the surface, as they are about recognition—what modicum of resolution, of visual information, is required to make an image register as such. Certainly, we can see the shapeless, the formless. But for practical purposes, the amorphic image is not useful to our human pursuits, unless of course you are being pursued by a monumental amoeba and it helps to recognize the beast itself. No, Jim is trying to reconnoiter the threshold of the coherent image. What can be discarded before form falls to formlessness. His process then requires the systematic discarding of pictorial information, generally swept along by glacial time frames—a moment's happenstance slowed toward veritable stasis.

There is something tantalizing about this pursuit because just beyond that visual threshold is the promise of optical freefall. Not a world unrecognized, but a world that flaunts familiarity, a world that stymies decipherment, a world unavailable to our nervous calculations.

Jim Campbell does all this with a handful of light emitting diodes and some uncanny instructions about when to blink.

Definitely worth seeing...if you can.

“Empire of Water,” on view until May 30 at The Church in Sag Harbor, New York, is well worth a wander out east. The exhibition, co-curated by The Church cofounder and artist Eric Fischl and the chief curator, Sara Cochran, features watery works from forty-two artists including Warhol, Ofili, Lichtenstein, Longo, and Kiefer, and an Aitken that delights. But the cake stealer is hiding in the back corner of the first floor: "Topographic Wave II," by Jim Campbell. — Joshua Liberson

Art @ Home

Left to right: Gideon Rubin, Blue Suit (2019) and Jim Campbell, Southern California (2019)

Jim Campbell, Edition 26 (Temple in Yunnan), 2018

Jim Campbell, Women's March on Washington 3, 2017

Jim Campbell, Data Transformation 2, 2017

Left to right: Bernard Lokai, o.T. (2011) and Jim Campbell, Grand Central Station 5 (2010)

Jim Campbell, Blur V, 2017

Jim Campbell, Library, 2003

About the artist

Jim Campbell's work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. His work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 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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