Silent harvest
The environmental piece, Silent Harvest was a series of nocturnal landscapes curated by Juan Puntes and Susanne Karbin at White Box Projects.
This body of work included 26 small-scale oil paintings, 22 on canvas and board, and 4 on paper, a medium reflecting the artist’s preoccupation with the fragility of life.
Set against a black wall in a dimly lit room, the exhibit combined traditional painting with modern installation. The monumental representation of industry was ironically compressed and transformed to a dotted band of pearls lining the room where the dark images were juxtaposed with the brilliant gems of light emitted from tiny windows and burning towers.
Growing up amidst the industry that spans the Canadian landscape had a profound impact on Campbell’s perception of transportation and industrialization and its effects on the people and the land. In the Silent Harvest series, Campbell’s representation of these brooding and silent industrial sites reflected on the past and awaiting the future.
This series, the result of extensive research and travel through the northeast, was seen through the eye of the solitary traveler as revealing nightscapes and unsettling stark panoramas. Distancing the viewer, dark monuments cleaved the horizon through the speeding processional of progress, and as black smoke rose to the skies and the land became a smudge, the struggle of the environment rising from beneath the beauty of the flashing lights.
Plexiglas, aluminum, oil paint, paint, adhesive, canvas, board, work on paper
site specific installation at White Box, NY
