Jim Campbell & Marco Maggi: Almost Indecipherable
In two solo exhibitions and one collaborative piece, two artists with very different practices - Uruguayan post-minimalist, Marco Maggi, and Bay Area tech pioneer, Jim Campbell - explore perception and how a viewer's perspective informs their interpretation of an artwork or experience. One artist's primary tools are paper, an X-ACTO knife and graphite, while the other works with circuit boards and LEDs. For both, however, time is a principal component.
Campbell, an MIT-educated engineer, designs and builds artworks utilizing custom electronics. Best known for creating moving images with such low resolution that they nearly defy comprehension, his exploration of the thin line between abstraction and recognition is a study of the human capacity to extrapolate from our experiences to "fill in the gaps" and find meaning in unfamiliar or puzzling information.
Maggi, renowned for his minute and detailed drawings, uses a lexicon of marks that - depending upon the person looking - has been compared to the alphabet of an unknown language, maps of vaguely familiar cities, or computer circuitry. Since his presentation in the Uruguayan pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, his vocabulary has also included the tiniest hand-cut paper shapes that cluster, fold, curl and stack, encrusting both framed artworks and the walls of the gallery.
If Campbell's strategy is to give you too little information to comprehend what you're seeing, Maggi's is to give you too much. Though Maggi's dense mark-making suggests hieroglyphs, satellite images or nanotechnologies, their specific meaning is ambiguous, even bewildering. You're compelled to move in close, spend time trying to make sense of what you're seeing, and decipher it. Conversely, in the case of Campbell's LED works, the nearer you are, the less comprehensible they become. It's only by stepping away and watching at length, that you get the perspective you need to form meaning.
With both artists' work, you, the viewer, are compelled to physically act out a metaphor for achieving understanding. You must alter your perspective to see things from another point of view to find deeper significance in your experience.
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In two solo exhibitions and one collaborative piece, two artists with very different practices - Uruguayan post-minimalist, Marco Maggi, and Bay Area tech pioneer, Jim Campbell - explore perception and how a viewer's perspective informs their interpretation of an artwork or experience. One artist's primary tools are paper, an X-ACTO knife and graphite, while the other works with circuit boards and LEDs. For both, however, time is a principal component.
Campbell, an MIT-educated engineer, designs and builds artworks utilizing custom electronics. Best known for creating moving images with such low resolution that they nearly defy comprehension, his exploration of the thin line between abstraction and recognition is a study of the human capacity to extrapolate from our experiences to "fill in the gaps" and find meaning in unfamiliar or puzzling information.
Maggi, renowned for his minute and detailed drawings, uses a lexicon of marks that - depending upon the person looking - has been compared to the alphabet of an unknown language, maps of vaguely familiar cities, or computer circuitry. Since his presentation in the Uruguayan pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, his vocabulary has also included the tiniest hand-cut paper shapes that cluster, fold, curl and stack, encrusting both framed artworks and the walls of the gallery.
If Campbell's strategy is to give you too little information to comprehend what you're seeing, Maggi's is to give you too much. Though Maggi's dense mark-making suggests hieroglyphs, satellite images or nanotechnologies, their specific meaning is ambiguous, even bewildering. You're compelled to move in close, spend time trying to make sense of what you're seeing, and decipher it. Conversely, in the case of Campbell's LED works, the nearer you are, the less comprehensible they become. It's only by stepping away and watching at length, that you get the perspective you need to form meaning.
With both artists' work, you, the viewer, are compelled to physically act out a metaphor for achieving understanding. You must alter your perspective to see things from another point of view to find deeper significance in your experience.
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In two solo exhibitions and one collaborative piece, two artists with very different practices 鈥� Uruguayan post-minimalist Marco Maggi and Bay Area tech pioneer Jim Campbell
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