new work

I've been casually following Jim Campbell's multimedia art for several years now, thanks in large part to the many times I've encountered his work at Hosfelt Gallery.  I used to find his use of LED technology to create moving figures merely amusing, but then I went to see the Home Movies exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum two years ago in which he installed a huge grid of LEDs to project evocative black-and-white images onto the gallery wall.  Suddenly he had my full attention.  Campbell's current show at Hosfelt has one of those LED arrays as well as a whole host of other technology-based pieces.  Though some of his seascapes that marry still photographs to an illusion of rolling waves edge dangerously close to cheesy pizza-parlor-beer-ad territory, as a whole the work exhibits a mechanical virtuosity that is totally mind-blowing.  Campbell is concerned with time and recollection itself, and when he shows shadowy, abstracted travelers scurrying across the floor of Grand Central it is as if he has plucked a memory right out of his own brain and made it visible.  The most astonishing piece in the show incorporates a new innovation where the artist has "exploded" the LEDs out of a flat plane and into three-dimensional space, and as you stand in front of his suspended lights you can just make out the movements of birds taking flight from a roof.  Apparently this is the same technology Campbell will use to create a large-scale work for the SFMOMA atrium next year, and to say that I can't wait to see what he will do in that space does not even begin to cover my excitement.