Jim Campbell, Primal Graphics 2002
February 20, 2002 - October 2002

Jim Campbell, whose work was the sensation of the Whitney Museum's recent BitStreams exhibition (March 22 - June 10, 2001) and is also featured in the Whitney Museum's 2002 Biennial (March 7 - May 26, 2002), created Primal Graphics 2002 specifically for Art on the Plaza. Primal Graphics 2002 is Campbell's first public sculpture in New York City and his second project with Creative Time. It is an outdoor sculpture composed of 386 light bulbs situated on two 10 x 13-foot grids. The image (which will rotate periodically) is of a moving human figure resembling a shadow and is displayed as if it were film, with seamless technology. As we approach, however, the figure not only loses form and becomes amorphous but the light bulb grid and its rudimentary nature become apparent. The piece is testament to Campbell's belief that technology can be used in ways that transcend its soulless nature. The shadow, with its poetic simplicity, evokes absence, time passage and loss while the figure's dissolution alludes to the transience of images, illusions of technology and most importantly, the necessity to question what we see.

Campbell often employs technology to address universal humanist themes such as memory, time, objectivity and subjectivity. In Primal Graphics 2002 the figure's anonymity raises questions of surveillance, a past theme in the artist's work. Furthermore, its corporeality is dismembered by the camera lens, which moves around the body, resulting in frames of hands, arms, legs, hips and other body parts, challenging what we see as well as the process of perception. The body's dismemberment reminds us of the insurmountable disconnect between technology and body. It also reminds us that digital imagery — even when representing a complex human form — is comprised of basic, numerical information. For example, in Primal Graphics 2002, at any given moment in the imagery, a certain number of light bulbs use 256 gradients of gray to form a single body part, which then merge with the other body parts to form a cinematic whole, pointing to the potential for technology to materialize into imagery.