barrier

barrier

peter campus

2020-21

FEBRUARY 27 – MARCH 29, 2023

MAIN GALLERY (UNDERNEATH THE MEZZANINE)

videograph: 6:46

The term “time-based media” that is typically applied to video or sound works is a little disingenuous; to apprehend any work of art the viewer or audience is required to expend time, an irreplaceable portion of their life. It would be more accurate to distinguish durational art – that which elapses over a set period of time – from the other kinds. peter campus from the outset has been very concerned with chrono-durational relationships in his videos, which are posited as visual queries of how we sense and experience time. His videos aver that change is how mortals measure time; if we are not able to detect change – through shifting light, color, or movement, for example – we lose all sense of time. The artist’s fossil (1987) and similar video projections of still images exemplify this sense of temporal stasis. campus’ videographs, however, from early works like Head of a Sad Young Woman (1976-77), to post morrow winter (2023) and including the Covid-era barrier, are statically framed views that aren’t absolutely still or change-less. In particular, barrier occupies a space between the static video projections and the looping, circuitous rhythm of waves in post morrow winter. barrier perhaps embodies the elusive, elastic experience of time we often felt during the depths of Covid, but campus gives it contemplative focus with subtle manipulations and emphases. Some of the detectable movements reveal a slowed motion; the grasses move in the wind and gulls float in and out view in seemingly different time-spaces. The caution red-orange of a gate-mounted sign, repeated in a bit of plastic mesh fencing, are subtly heightened against the subdued greens of grasses and the prevailing grays of pavement, fogged sky, and sea. barrier strongly evokes poet Octavio Paz’s observation that light is time thinking about itself. Nothing much happens; everything is happening.