New York
Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco-based light artist Jim Campbell, who studied math and engineering at M.I.T., began constructing interactive video environments in the mid-1980s. He has worked with LEDs for more than 10 years, using them in arranged sequences of lights whose brightness changes over time; the dim, blurry images that result can suggest anything from bird flight to a taxi ride. The low-resolution images intimate real things, but they ask that we fill in the spaces as the numerous lights go on and off. In doing so, we complete the picture, the lights almost becoming part of the brain’s consciousness. There is an interesting synthesis between the moving image and the lights that represent it. Arranged in a grid, the light pattern reads as a sculpture in its own right—before viewers make sense of the flickering images. Exploded View (Birds) (2010) consists of a three-dimensional outlay of 1,100 LEDs hanging at intervals that allow visitors to walk through them. Viewers see birds fluttering as they take flight and land—but only when they face the lights.…see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
