Rebecca Campbell

Thanks to Elena Harvey Collins for premiering this in-progress body of work at Art Space Gallery in Fresno, CA. This is the first incarnation of these pieces that are being made concurrently with a new series of paintings. They are inspired by the devastation I felt after the 2016 Presidential election. How could we have possibly ended up here with an unapologetic misogynist as President of the United States?

I began reflecting on how the documents, oral histories, patterns and images created by our families, communities, and political or religious institutions are endlessly complicated and often contradictory in the perspectives they present. You can create almost any narrative you want from their open weave of light and dark, past and present, true and false, joy and tragedy. One generation lays their pictures, their text and their experiences over the next, we pull the remnants we wish to be true into focus and let others fade, only to see the next generation choosing different threads to strengthen or cut. 

My father wrote me a letter when I was 19 years old. It’s a four page letter and he tells me on every page that he loves me. He also tells me on every page what a disappointment and heartbreak I’ve been to him. He wrote the letter while on a road trip he took himself on in the midst of a midlife crisis. It was shortly after I had moved in with my boyfriend and in his mind we were living in sin. The letter is clear evidence of a man who loves his daughter as deeply as a father can. It is also evidence of a man struggling to keep his beloved patriarchy in place at all costs even the cost of a beloved child. At one point he says I am more like him than any of his children but goes on to lament that I am a girl and I must play by the rules that have been determined. My most valuable asset is my chastity, and without it I am a “leftover“ and no man will want me. 

This is how you end up with an unapologetic misogynist as president of the United States of America. You justify oppression with love.

I am a pillar of inconsistency: on being a human, an artist, and a woman.

I grew up in a fundamentally patriarchal system. Men were granted supernatural powers from god and women were left to fend in the ordinary bodies allotted them. Fortunately an early, covert dose of Sylvia Plath and David Bowie helped me escape this fate and sent me wandering my way into the arms of feminism. As far as dogmas go, I definitely traded up.

The complication came in being an artist, inherently allergic to any dogma.

I am a pillar of inconsistency, a narcissist who would die without hesitation for my family, a fan of Martha Stewart and John Waters, a fundamentalist and revolutionary. Fortunately the complication is the cure and art is the perfect language to explore this state of multiplicity.

I’ve just made two bodies of work exploring the complexities of being a woman and making pictures of women. 

 The first is straightforward. I struggle with not only the vast gender inequities across the board when it comes to women in the creative world but also the particulars of my idols and friends being underestimated, underrepresented and underpaid. I am watching women disappear. I’m not a theorist but of course I want to have a say in the course of history so I am using what I do in a very literal way. I’m painting the portraits of every woman artist I know. I’m painting them so they will not disappear. The brilliant and performative extension of this project has been the many hours I spend hearing each of their different and powerful perspectives. 

The second project is more difficult to explain. It started as part of a call and response collaboration with artist Samantha Fields. We each chose a news item from the day we were born to respond to with an artwork. I chose a society piece on a party at the “Playboy Mansion.” 

Collaging with contrasting tapes on Miss April 1971 I created something both beautiful and terrible. The image was so absorbing and quarrelsome I was inspired to monumentally remake it. The 6’ x 14’ image was first painted realistically then troweled over with waxy paint mimicking the tape, 90% of the original painting obliterated. I became infatuated with this paradox and made 2 more paintings. One a penthouse model burqaed in silver glitter, and the last a portrait of Candy Darling, cocooned in whitewash and gold leaf.

Picasso would twist a woman in space so you understand the totality of the eye. I’m curious to explore our paradoxical relationship to these patriarchal images of beauty and desire, at once seduced and repulsed. Slabs of paint are suffocating violation, protective barrier and teasing veil. These are not linear narratives the way cubist space was not linear.

Quantum physicists have proved it but artist have always known it. Particles exist in multiple places at once. Truth is not a fixed point. Artists are the guardians of the freedom to be broken.

As women demand equity there is sometimes a call to circle the wagons. This is practical for survival mode. As we get closer to attaining justice I hope we also see tolerance for inconsistency and brokenness. Some of my favorite male creators are broken. Belmer, Balthus, Scheile, DeSade, Fragonard, Cheever, Bataille. I want this privilege for myself. I want to explore dissonance and instead of having it translated into a betrayal of my gender it might be translated as a meditation on the labyrinth of our human experience. 

L.A. Louver is proud to present an exhibition by artist Rebecca Campbell that features a new series of portraits, all of woman artists.

Motivated by the lack of gender equity in the creative world, and in homage to the artists who inspire her, Campbell began her You are Here project in Fall 2015. The first 19 paintings were exhibited at L.A. Louver January 13 –February 13, 2016.

“I am not interested in making photographic portraits; I don’t sort people out by what they make; I just choose people who are serious, diligent, hard working, and good at what they do.”

– Rebecca Campbell

Campbell makes each painting with the same dimensions (30 x 22 1⁄2 in. [76.2 x 56.5 cm]), using paper that she primes with a custom pink acrylic paint. She then employs a limited palette of black, white, and gray to build the portrait. Although she approaches each work with identical parameters, Campbell imbues each portrait with a unique sense of identity, capturing their likeness with bold and gestural brushstrokes. Each sitter meets the gaze of the viewer, with her strengths and vulnerabilities candidly conveyed. Beyond subject matter, these works are a celebration of painting itself, and the quality of imagery that can only be brought forth with paint and brush. As Campbell states, “I believe deeply in process being content.”

The women painters, sculptors, writers and performers Campbell depicts include: Amy Adler, Sarah Awad, Linda Besemer, Heather Brown, Kristin Calabrese, Kyung Sun Cho, Natalia Fabia, Carlee Fernandez, Patricia Fernandez, Samantha Fields, Alexandra Grant, Lia Halloran, Annie Lapin, Gwynn Murrill, Susan Silton, Anne-Elizabeth Sobieski, Jennifer Steinkamp, Mpambo Wina, and Eve Wood. 

New paintings under construction. Check back for updates.

“The Potato Eaters” is a large series of paintings and sculptures that opened for exhibition at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in May of 2016. For more information on this series or images of the complete body of work please contact LA Louver or the Campbell Studio.

"'The Potato Eaters' is inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s work of the same name as well as by my own family’s agrarian roots. My mother and father were both raised on potato farms; black and white photos of that time and place serve as inspiration for many of the paintings in this series.

In 1885 van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: “I really have wanted to make it so that people get the idea that these folk, who are eating their potatoes by the light of their little lamp, have tilled the earth themselves with these hands that they are putting in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labor and—that they have thus honestly earned their food.” As Europe in 1885 was already very much an industrial economy, one might be tempted to see van Gogh’s turn to the land as romantic or sentimental. I would suggest that this gesture of turning to the past to examine a more direct relationship between humans and the land is more accurately characterized as nostalgic.

The word “nostalgia” has its origins in the Greek nostos, meaning “return home,” and the Old English genesan, “to survive.”

In making works that examine aspects of family and cultural history, memory, documentation, and nostalgia, I hope to address nostalgia’s disruptive effects on linear time and to propose that this phenomenon might be considered under the rubric of an archetypically feminine sublime, as an underestimated strategy for finding meaning in the face of loss and death. When a person acutely experiences nostalgia, time collapses and the past, the present, and the future become one. A nostalgic moment for me might be triggered by a photograph of my mother as a young woman: that in turn prompts other memories or thoughts, perhaps of my own youth, of yesterday afternoon, and ultimately of experiences I have yet to have or that are not even my own. Time becomes nonlinear in a space that is both sad and sweet at the same time. Nostalgia somehow enables us to sing along to the tune of our own deaths.

In this series I’m also concerned with the connections and distance between the theoretical and the physical. I’m inspired by Roland Barthes’s suggestion that the value of works in modernity comes from their duplicity. In that light, I am creating works that seek out the seam between ideas and their performance. In specific, theoretical notions of nostalgia, time, and the sublime are considered through physical acts of making paintings, installations, sculptures, and films—creating documents of connections and distances between these realities. The works of art become artifacts of the ideas that are processed through experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs between these ideas and their practice.

In “The Potato Eaters” I explore the often sentimentalized and disregarded significance of nostalgic experience. It is often assumed that the act of “art” lies primarily in the conceptualization of an object or experience and that the artist’s hand or body is at best irrelevant and at worst a corrupting force in an idealized realization of that act. I, like van Gogh, am interested in the intersection of visceral experience and intellectual production. It is through the lens of nostalgia—with its blurring of before and after, then and now, body and memory—that these paintings attend to land, labor, and the physical realm, staving off, for a time, the false comforts of the purely conceptual."

Rebecca Campbell

Art After Death

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

“Love writes a letter and sends it to hate.

My vacation’s ending. I'm coming home late.

The weather was fine and the ocean was great 

and I can't wait to see you again.”

                                                                The Avett Brothers

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is an exploration of opposites, contradictions and syncopations enmeshing themselves in one another. My aim is to seek clarity through parallax where displacing an image with a divergent form brings new meaning into focus. The pictures cluster and looking at one brings the other into sight; the ornament of youth veils the horror of ravage bears the potential of desire proposing the ether of distance. The form is also an alloy; precision, abandon, color, eclipse, figure and abstraction. The stains and marks mirror the image while also opening it to interpretation. These fusions are not intended to mutilate meaning but instead to transcribe its orbit with the gravity of opposing forces.

A friend warned me not to paint clowns with the declaration “Everyone hates clowns. No exceptions.” Similar warnings might have been issued for all of the subjects I’ve chosen, mushroom cloud, rainbow, lightning, the nude. They are melodramatic and cliché, almost empty symbols, but they also have different faces. Chancing embarrassment and failure is nothing to uncovering a piece of enormity the image once knew. I am an artist not a doctor.  Risk is my obligation. I chase life and death, light, scale, power, and carnality with my brush. These wonders often masquerade as one another and I paint the ring in which they perform.

Rebecca Campbell

Romancing the Apocalypse

Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2011

"Rebecca Campbell’s new paintings are looser and juicier and far more beautiful than anything she has made since she began exhibiting her haunting works in Los Angeles 10 years ago. They’re also stranger and scarier than anything else being made today — despite, and because of, their generally benign subjects: pretty girls, gorgeous rainbows and sublime fireworks.

Titled “Romancing the Apocalypse,” Campbell’s smoldering show at L.A. Louver turns melodrama into a whiplash-inducing collision with pleasures whose intensity is driven to a feverish pitch because they are fleeting — there for the moment and then gone forever.

Rather than illustrating this Romantic idea in over-dramatized images of fateful events, Campbell boils it down to the basics: the way she lays paint down on canvas, with just the right mix of bull’s-eye precision and forget-it abandon.

Whether painting rainbows, fireworks or mushroom clouds, the real drama is played out in Campbell’s brushstrokes. Emotionally loaded stories unfold as the brush’s bristles are dragged this way and that. Single strokes often start out as gooey gobs of inchoate matter before quickly segueing into deliberate gestures, only to dissipate into messy meltdowns of mixed tints, flattened volumes, lost textures and, ultimately, bare-canvas emptiness. Whistler’s jaw-dropping nocturnes come to mind but do not overshadow the freewheeling fluidity and existential weight of Campbell’s drop-dead paint handling. 

Her pictures of girls and women, all lost in thought and more or less oblivious to their surroundings, add sexual tension to the proceedings. Innocence and vulnerability take fleshy form as Campbell manages to make regret and contentment palpable.

All but two of her paintings are small, no bigger than 12-by-20-inches. Their size is belied by their visual power, which packs a wallop and doesn’t stop.

Her 7-by-5-foot “Epidemic” and 4-by-8-foot “Romancing the Apocalypse” are show-stopping knockouts. Each depicts a solitary woman in an unsettling scenario and gives Campbell ample space to strut her painterly stuff. You feel the drama of her works in your gut, where the conflict between holding everything together and just letting go matters most.

-- David Pagel"

Poltergeist

Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as a combination of the Greek root nostos meaning "return home" and the Old English genesan meaning "to survive." In my body of work Poltergeist I explore the often sentimentalized and disregarded significance of this experience. In exploring aspects of childhood, memory, and nostalgia I hope to address nostalgia's disruptive effects on linear time and to propose that this phenomenon might be considered under the rubric of an archetypically feminine sublime, as an underestimated strategy for finding meaning in the face of loss and death. For example when a person is having an acute experience of nostalgia, time collapses and the past, the present and the future become one. A nostalgic moment for me might be triggered by a memory of walking through the forest behind my house when I was five but that memory then triggers others, dancing to Boys Don't Cry while drinking black label beer at the Liberty Park, cutting lavender for the dinner table yesterday afternoon and ultimately a sense of the loss of experiences I have yet to have. Time becomes nonlinear and it's both sad and sweet at the same time. Nostalgia somehow enables us to sing along to the tune of our own deaths.

In this work I'm also concerned with the connections and distance between the theoretical and the physical. Inspired by Barthes premise in Pleasure of the Text that "Whence, perhaps, a means of evaluating the works of our modernity: their value would proceed from their duplicity. By which it must be understood that they always have two edges. The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss." I am creating works that seek out the seam between ideas and their performance. In specific, theoretical notions of nostalgia, time, and the sublime are considered through physical acts of making paintings, installations, sculptures and films creating documents of these connections and distances. The works of art become artifacts of ideas being processed through experiences and the inevitable distortion that occurs between these ideas and their practice.

Practically speaking, I circumscribe "the midst of bliss" by choosing signs, materials and techniques that give forms to the premise. One notion I am interested in is landscape. The sign I have chosen to represent this with is the tree. Perspectives on nature, wildness and space are examined by animating the tree in various media and interpretive techniques including monumental gestural painting, documentary film footage and life size sculptural construction. The content also unfolds through investment in metaphoric materials. My interest in the nostalgia's transgressive effect on linear time is expressed through the juxtaposition of materials that connote particular and disparate time periods and cultural pedigrees. These materials include, oil paint on canvas, bronze, copper, shag carpet, acrylic paint on drywall, velvet, glass, Windex, etc. The amalgam of these textures allows me to embody my ideas about time without reducing them to a didactic argument. The resonance is one faceted with the familiarity of the body and the fiction of the mind. Marguerite Duras describes these phenomena as "Dreams of another time when the same thing that is going to happen would happen differently. In another way. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands of others who, like ourselves, dream of this time, necessarily. This dream contaminates me."

Rebecca Campbell