Touching Color

Time, Memory and Meditation: Works by Jim Campbell features electronic sculptures utilizing cutting-edge computer technology. The nine-piece solo exhibition includes selected works from the digitally recorded "Memory Works Series," two installations "Digital Watch" and "Experiments in Touching Color," and two new works featuring collapsed film sequences titled, "Illuminated Averages,"

"We wanted to produce an exhibition that blended the best of sculpture with computer technology and engineering," said Amy Moorefield, the Anderson Gallery’s assistant director and exhibition co-curator. "Jim Campbell’s work, which is highly intelligent and extremely innovative, accomplishes that objective."

Campbell, who works three days a week as an engineer in Silicon Valley, believes that art and technology feed from each other. Using photographs, lights, personal heartbeat and body rhythms, custom electronics and LCD material, video cameras and projectors, he creates innovative installations that encourage viewer participation. He calls his art "a search for truth more than a search for beauty," and describes his exhibits as "interactive between the viewer and themselves."

Digital Watch

"Often the criticism of artwork using hi-tech technology is that the artwork has little or no content, or that it’s a trick or an interesting device, but that it’s not art or that it’s bad art. This is not the case in Campbell’s work," said Bob Kaputof, VCU associate professor of kinetic imagery and exhibition co-curator. "Campbell blends technology, metaphor, memory and perception beautifully. He makes very unique digital sculptures."

Born in Chicago, Campbell received degrees in both mathematics and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and his work is collected by major museums and art centers around the world. The VCU exhibition marks the first time the San Francisco-based artist’s work has been showcased in Virginia.
A full color brochure will accompany the exhibit with essays by Steve Seid , Video Curator, Pacific Film Archives, Berkley, California, Bob Kaputof and Amy Moorefield.

Please join the Anderson Gallery in welcoming the artist, Jim Campbell on February 23 at 11am for a lecture at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Engineering Auditorium.
School of Engineering Auditorium. Rm 403
601 West Main Street
Richmond, Virginia 23284

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Sculpture Department of Virginia Commonwealth University. For details, contact the Anderson Gallery at 804-828-1522.

Jim Campbell
Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received two Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. His work has been shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The Power Plant, Toronto; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley, and the San Jose Museum of Art. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has recently received a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, a Langlois Foundation Grant, and a Eureka Fellowship Award. As an engineer he holds more than a dozen patents in the field of video image processing.