Poetry in light: The art of Jim Campbell
February 16, 2016
The images captured inside Plexiglas were projected on walls and suspended from the ceiling. Made up of hundreds of individual LEDs, each image had an ethereal quality that was familiar and otherworldly at the same time. This was the work of Bay Area artist Jim Campbell whose major exhibition at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art closed on Feb 7.
Campbell has displayed his work in major modern art galleries in Europe and in airport terminals in Southern California. He started as an electrical engineer working on high-definition videos. Thirty years ago, he began to create low-resolution art.
“My day job was high-definition TV, and my artwork went the other way,” said Campbell in a 2015 interview with KQED public television.
The central idea of his art is that if you take pixels away, you begin to reveal the essence of an image.
Campbell wanted to challenge viewers with his displays by showing the inner beauty of human movement and natural forms. He gave luminescent inner life to the moving images of everyday events, like children swimming, birds flying and people riding bicycles. The images glow – the human movement is pared down to the sublime shift of a single LED pixel going dark, and the next adjacent one turning on to carry the motion forward.
As with the art of poetry, Campbell’s work is all about reduction. In a world where extra sharp 4K video images are the most prized, these digital art images find a closer kinship to old home movies where the lives of people appear as distant memories.
Campbell’s old home movie footage is often used by Campbell as source material for his installations.
At the downtown San Jose gallery, visitors interacted with Campbell’s work. They would lie on the ground and gaze at the suspended piece that showed the moving low resolution image of birds in flight.
Campbell reduced these images to juxtapositions of shadows and light and primary colors. In the result, they possess a power to conjure memories and inspire emotions in those who had the chance to see these poems made of light.
