Jim Campbell: Home Movies
Technology and Transparency
As a leading developer of high-definition television, Jim Campbell has refined the technology of the image to almost complete transparency. Yet in works like Home Movies, installed in Gallery 2, Campbell uses his art practice to measure the limits of this transparency—often accessing the subjective interpretations that define our relationship with the moving image.
Home Movies is a floor-to-ceiling LED grid hanging in columns six inches from a wall that flickers with the seductive familiarity of the cinema. The fixtures themselves obstruct our comprehension of the total image, and so, peering through the wires, we understand each LED as a pixel within the overall projection system. For the movies themselves Campbell processed a set of salvaged amateur films, spanning four decades, to their essential bytes of information, thereby reversing his efforts as an engineer to reduce the inherent distractions of the digitally mediated image.
This dialectical practice might seem insincere if it weren’t for Campbell’s implication of subjective memory. Home movies are always correlative to their makers, but here they are stripped of their identifying characteristics and made barely recognizable. The loss of these signifiers and the incorporation of the false screen paradoxically contribute to the work’s magnetism, pulling us in to connect the dots between the image and our own memories. Combining the criticality of Conceptual art and the emotive pleasure of cinema, Home Movies exposes the digital image’s many approximations while setting the stage for an innovative perceptual experience.
Dena Beard
MATRIX Curatorial Assistant
Support for this exhibition has been provided by Joachim and Nancy Bechtle.
