Jim Campbell at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery
Kate Hackman
Over the last decade, Byron C. Cohen Gallery has established itself as an anchor of the Kansas City gallery scene, tending to be the most consistently solid commercial space in town for current work by mid-career, nationally and internationally known artists. Indeed, a survey of notable private collections in town can seem rather like a Cohen greatest hits show, with pieces by gallery regulars like Judy Pfaff, Jane Hammond, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Lesley Dill and Hung Liu cropping up everywhere. However, it is reflective of shifts in the local art climate over the last several years that the gallery has been mixing it up more of late, introducing locals to artists such as Nina Bovasso, Mitch Kern, Nobuhito Nishigawara, Yoshio Itagaki and many lesser-knowns. Perhaps most indicative of the growth of the scene is that Cohen has added a number of local artists to its roster, including Peregrine Honig, known for erotically charged drawings of young girls.
Co-owned by long-time collector Byron Cohen and his daughter Toma Wolf, the gallery can seem schizophrenic at times, but its eclecticism makes it fun to watch. Currently on view are six works by San Francisco-based artist Jim Campbell, who has earned acclaim for technologically innovative–and surprisingly evocative–LED (light emitting diode) sculptures.
Applying a background in mathematics and electrical engineering to the creation of objects, Campbell lands at a place where mechanics are the crux of the thing but not the endpoint. In Depth of Field, video imagery shot from a city sidewalk–figures passing in and out of view; cars cruising by further in the distance–is transposed to a board of LEDs. In front of it, a piece of Plexiglas is secured at an angle, such that the top portion of the moving image appears as little more than a field of randomly blinking lights, while the imagery becomes recognizable across the bottom portion, where the glass is angled further away. Serving as a filter, the Plexiglas becomes something of a decoder ring, the lens that allows us to make sense of this compressed information, and subsequently attach meaning to it. Perhaps most effectively of the three LED-based pieces included here, this work hones in on the threshold between discernible image and pure abstraction. It also addresses the role movement plays in that process, as a still shot of the work makes obvious. As the imagery is broken down through the LED board into a grid of flashing units, its capacity to communicate is presented as the product of a series of limited, mutually contingent bits of information flickering across a surface.
In this nether zone between all and nothing, fairly mundane imagery feels newly significant, as if willfully emerging despite counter attempts to repress it–a ghost in the machine. Campbell’s LED pieces further suggest the evolution toward a different sort of technologically specific way of seeing, a digital-age "period eye."
Also on view are three monumental color transparencies on lightboxes, created from feeding a span of video into a computer and printing all at once. These specifically capture protestors outside the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004–a flurry of anti-Bush posters, gesticulating bodies and cityscape. Parallels to Italian Futurism are amplified here by the content, giving the works a political charge and perhaps a degree of irony considering Futurism’s links to Fascism. These striking, painterly pieces seem in part a reversal–instead of striving to simulate motion when all one has is a paintbrush, Campbell forces real-time motion to conform to a flat surface. It’s an expansion and contraction at once, delivering a strong visual punch while bringing into play the whole history of representation as related to available tools at any given moment. One is reminded of the manner in which technology both empowers and reflects a way of seeing, as well of its constant role as a mediating force, at once inherently limited and possessive of unique expressive capacities.
