The Power Plant

Since the early 1970s, American artist Peter Campus has consistently explored the formal properties and possibilities of video. This critical engagement is visible in his 1973–76 series of performative exercises that includes the classic Three Transitions (1973), as well as in a body of work examining video’s relationship to the gallery space and the medium’s capacity for transforming viewers’ perceptions of self and of duration. Reflections and Inflections positions Campus as a key figure who laid the groundwork for many artists’ explorations of screen space.

The exhibition juxtaposes the iconic early work Anamnesis (1974) with a new multi-channel video, Inflections: changes in light and colour around Ponquogue Bay (2009), spanning more than three decades of Campus’s pioneering practice and his move from treating video as a sculptural to a pictorial medium. Anamnesis confronts viewers with a closed-circuit video feed of themselves; however, its three-second delay disorients one’s experience of time and embodiment. The British Film Institute-commissioned Inflections fills six monitors with its hypnotic, slowed-down images of Ponquogue Bay, Long Island, digitally altered to create painterly abstract landscapes that hover between stillness and motion.

Spring 2010 Program Guide