Skip to main content

Jim Campbell – Indirect Imaging

Dundee Contemporary Arts until January 25th 2014
Four stars

The light and a whole lot more besides pours out of the seven pieces in
Chicago-born LED auteur Jim Campbell's first ever UK solo show from the
moment you set foot into the DCA's foyer, where a digital clock behind
the reception desk displays the night and day of things rather than
time itself. If this is a precision-perfect image of a retro-future
relic, it's soporific fusion of low-lit high-tech isn't trying to be
cute, but comes fused with an intelligent and quietly personal poetry.

Outside Gallery 1, 'Motion and Rest 5' (2002) may at first glance
resemble a traffic sign, but is actually footage of a person walking on
crutches. Inside, similar optical effects are writ ever larger.
'Explode View (Commuters)' (2011), the self-explanatory 'Home Movies
1040-3' (2011) and 'A Fire, A Freeway and A Walk' (1999-2000) capture
bodies in rest and motion, en route to work, rest or play. 'Tilted
Plane' (2011) does something similar with birds in flight, albeit on a
grand scale as the viewer walks among a series of bulbs in
sensory-destabilising formations.

For all its meditative, multi-hued expanse, much of it feels like a
curtain-raising primer for the piece that takes up the whole of the
venue's Gallery 2 space. 'Last Day in the Beginning of March' (2003)
reflects on the final hours of Campbell's brother's life by tapping
into a series of imagined memories through twenty-six synchronised
bulbs beamed down from the ceiling. As each one pulses its circle of
light at different speeds, they reflect a moment, a feeling or an
anxiety immortalised on a series of name-plates lined around the dimmed
walls.

Out of the gloom comes a carefully choreographed set of sense memories
that become both homage and elegy to the piece's subject. Where it
would have been easy to go for chill-out room ambience, 'Last Day in
the Beginning of March' is noticeably the only installation to use
sound throughout. As the pools of lights dance, that their accompanying
noises off are those of the sort of relentless but curiously
undemonstrative rainfall one associates with deserted cities at dusk
speaks volumes about the way Campbell keeps his fires burning close to
home.

The List, December 2014


ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...