Peter Campus
26 Mar - 24 May 2010
PETER CAMPUS
"Reflections and Inflections"
26 March - 24 May, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, 25 March, 8-11 PM
Curated by Gregory Burke, Director of The Power Plant
Beginning in the early 1970s, American artist Peter Campus has consistently explored the formal properties and possibilities of video. This critical engagement is visible in his 1973–76 series of performative exercises that includes the classic Three Transitions (1973), as well as in a body of work examining video’s relationship to the gallery space and the medium’s capacity for transforming viewers’ perceptions of self and of duration. In this exhibition, Campus stands as a key figure who laid the groundwork for many artists’ explorations of screen space.
‘Peter Campus: Reflections and Inflections’ juxtaposes the iconic early work Anamnesis (1974) with a new multi-channel video, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009), spanning thirty-five years of Campus’s pioneering practice and his move from treating video as a sculptural to a pictorial medium. Anamnesis confronts viewers with a closed-circuit video feed of themselves; however, its three-second delay disorients one’s experience of time and embodiment. The British Film Institute-commissioned Inflections... fills six monitors with its hypnotic, slowed-down images of Ponquogue Bay, Long Island, digitally altered to create painterly abstract landscapes that hover between stillness and motion.
Peter Campus (born in New York, 1937) received a BS in experimental psychology from Ohio State University, Columbus, and graduated from the City College Film Institute, New York. In addition to participating in numerous biennials and major group exhibitions, Campus has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremen (2004), Albion Gallery, London (2007), and the British Film Institute, London (2009–10).
"Reflections and Inflections"
26 March - 24 May, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, 25 March, 8-11 PM
Curated by Gregory Burke, Director of The Power Plant
Beginning in the early 1970s, American artist Peter Campus has consistently explored the formal properties and possibilities of video. This critical engagement is visible in his 1973–76 series of performative exercises that includes the classic Three Transitions (1973), as well as in a body of work examining video’s relationship to the gallery space and the medium’s capacity for transforming viewers’ perceptions of self and of duration. In this exhibition, Campus stands as a key figure who laid the groundwork for many artists’ explorations of screen space.
‘Peter Campus: Reflections and Inflections’ juxtaposes the iconic early work Anamnesis (1974) with a new multi-channel video, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009), spanning thirty-five years of Campus’s pioneering practice and his move from treating video as a sculptural to a pictorial medium. Anamnesis confronts viewers with a closed-circuit video feed of themselves; however, its three-second delay disorients one’s experience of time and embodiment. The British Film Institute-commissioned Inflections... fills six monitors with its hypnotic, slowed-down images of Ponquogue Bay, Long Island, digitally altered to create painterly abstract landscapes that hover between stillness and motion.
Peter Campus (born in New York, 1937) received a BS in experimental psychology from Ohio State University, Columbus, and graduated from the City College Film Institute, New York. In addition to participating in numerous biennials and major group exhibitions, Campus has had recent solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Bremen (2004), Albion Gallery, London (2007), and the British Film Institute, London (2009–10).