April CommQuote

I love this bleary mixing of media morphing into other media forms/formats. That's what artist Jim Campbell is all about as reported in Benjamin Sutton's Why Is Jim Campbell’s Low-Res Video Art So Compelling, Even Captivating? for artnet news.

"In Topography Reconstruction Wave (2014) [pictured below], the footage of a crashing wave plays behind a thick layer of resin sculpted to represent a photograph of a wave. This work, part of a new series employing more sculptural elements than much of Campbell’s preceding works, culminates when the blurred video of the wave seems to line up perfectly with the sculpted resin wave encasing it....In addition to the process of stripping away visual information in his low-resolution videos, he is increasingly interested in the conversion of one type of media into another—in the case of the resin works, transforming black-and-white images into three-dimensional sculptures. The effect is deeply unsettling because of the way in which the video’s flickering lights interact with the translucent resin.

'As the lights change it distorts based on how thick the resin is, and what that does is that as the light passes through the face it feels like the face is moving, which goes back to this theory about some of the very earliest cave paintings that we have found; some people have suggested that with fire in there that they were actually animated,' Campbell explained."

You can take in the full article here.