Studio Visit: Rebecca Campbell, The Subjective Lens of Perception
By Gary Brewer
“There is a painting in her studio, “Miss April 1971,” a 6 x 14 foot long painting of a 1971 Playboy centerfold. She first collaged the image using different kinds of tape to obscure parts and to crop and frame others. It is a tour de force work that conveys her capacity to create startling juxtapositions of different forms of seeing, feeling and communicating. The fluidity of her bold brushwork is reminiscent of John Singer Sargent, a painter whom she loves. Ninety percent of these beautifully painted passages are obscured by flat, thickly troweled on paint to represent the tape she applied to the photo. This jarring juxtaposition of the nude Playboy model interrupted by the bold flat grey, metallic and white physical planes of paint that function abstractly like a Supremacist painting, is powerful, beautiful and strangely disturbing. She said in a statement about this work, ‘…I created something both beautiful and terrible. The image was so absorbing and quarrelsome…’ It is a profound work whose metaphoric ambiguity speaks on many levels, and leaves one in rapt attention to the subjective tension between the balance and chaos of the image both formally and emotionally. It is her relationship to the “patriarchal image of beauty and desire, at once seduced and repulsed” that she explores, the female gaze obliterating parts and leaving others. It is a painting in which Rebecca traverses the complexity of male/female modes of feeling and seeing. She demands the same privilege allotted male artists to explore the dark textural of dissonance of beauty and desire and objectification.”
Get a deeper look at Rebecca Campbell’s studio and read the complete article here.
Rebecca Campbell: A little breath that always goes the distance longing requires will be on view at Art Space Gallery, Fresno City College November 3 – December 7, 2017.
IMAGES: Rebecca Campbell, Miss April 1971, 2015, mixed media on canvas, 72 x 156 in. (182.9 x 396.2 cm)