Jim Campbell and Chris Verene    Nov 4 - Dec 31, 2005

The Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Comtemporary Art is please to welcome Jim Campbell back to Kansas City for his third solo show at our gallery. As an electronic artist with degrees in math and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jim Campbell has brought a new and more complex dimension to the video medium. His works explore a unique expression of the interaction between seeing and perception, form and content, and science and art. Campbell’s work incorporates electronic memory, prerecorded images as well as live images.

Attempting to create systems that respond and progress in recognizably non-random, but at the same time unpredictable ways, I have tried to create works that have destines of their own. Having always been fascinated with the philosophical analogies of certain scientific disciplines, my work has been very influenced by science, in particular some of the ideas relating to chaos and quantum mechanics. Using technological tools and scientific models as metaphors for memory and illusion, my work seeks to interpret, represent and mirror psychological states and processes, and their breakdown. Time and memory, individual and collective, electronic and real are the elements of my work.

-Jim Campbell

This show includes two bodies of work; Ambigious Icons and Illuminated Averages.

Ambiguous Icons explore the relationship between information and meaning, in the context of reduced or compressed levels of information. The resulting images move and navigate there way across the screen. These works incorporate the fairly new technology: Red-Green-Blue LEDs allowing each LED to be any color.

Illuminated Averages are a series of images displayed in light boxes in which each image is created by averaging all of the frames of a moving sequence. For example the first one created was an average of all the frames of the film Psycho. In that work almost 2 hours are collapsed to create one single image.

Jim Campbell reveals the artistic and poetic potential of electronic technology in his multimedia works. The results are often lyrical meditations on the nature of reality -- both psychological and physical -- that stimulate the senses. Jim Campbell has shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Kemper Museum, the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; the University Art Museum in Berkeley, The Power Plan, Toronto; as well as the International Center for Photography, New York to name a few. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the U.S. in Phoenix, Arizona.

Chris Verene

The Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Contemoporary Art is pleased to show the photography of nationally-renowned artist, Chris Verene for his first solo exhibition in Kansas City. Verene has been documenting his birthplace - the town of Galesburg, Illinois - for the past 18 years. This exhibition includes photographs from his ongoing essay of Galesburg, as well as an all-new chapter; Prairie Jews.

These color photographs from the past sixteen years document family and friends in a small railroad community in the Midwest. Some of these images are upbeat, some disturbing, but all reflect a community that exists close to this artist’s heart. Although Verene has produced a number of acclaimed series (including “Camera Club” and “The Self-Esteem Salons”), it is the Galesburg work that is the most revered and historically significant.

...The tacky interiors, worn clothes and forlorn expressions in the pictures suggest that not all is well in Galesburg, but Verene adds a commentary that tries its best to be upbeat and compassionate. ...the larger shadow hanging over Verene's work belongs to Diane Arbus, and that is not a bad thing.

-A. D. Coleman, writing for the New York Times Book Review

Also included in the exhibition are selections from his newest Galesburg chapter; Prairie Jews, which depict the lives of Jews living in Galesburg. This new work which is also included in the current exhibit “The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography,” which opened September 2005 at The Jewish Museum in New York City, and will travel through 2008. This show features a substantial number of Verene’s new photographs.

Poignant, empathetic, touching, and humorous, The Galesburg Series is also frequently challenging. Verene has been compared to Walker Evans, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin. An indication of the dynamic complexity of The Galesburg Series is the oft-debated potentially-exploitative aspect of these candid pictures. Depicting a “...semi-rural underclass that is seldom represented elsewhere, these images participate in the tradition of socially-conscious documentary-photography as well as the offbeat regionalism associated with William Eggelston,” asserts Philip Auslander, writing in ArtForum in 2004. Auslander goes on to ponder the fine line between representation and exploitation, as each viewer is also left to reach his own conclusion.

In 2006, Verene will be included in exhibits at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles (“Grass Roots: Recent American Photographs,” Spring 2006) and the Cranbrook Museum, Michigan (“Shoot the Family,” curated by Ralph Rugoff, traveling through 2008). Chris Verene’s work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the High Museum of Art and others. Verene was the first-ever photographer to receive a Pollock-Krasner Grant for full support (2002-2003). Verene was represented in the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and his “Self-Esteem Salon: The Orphanage” was an invitational feature in the 2005 Armory Art Fair, New York. His work has been exhibited in countless museums and galleries worldwide, and his bibliography includes PARKETT, ArtForum, Harper’s Magazine, Flash Art, Aperture, Vanity Fair, Art in America and the New York Times, among many others.

These works will be on view at the Byron C. Cohen Gallery for Contemporary Art at 2020 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, Missouri November 4 - Demember 31, 2005

Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday 11 am - 5 pm and by appointment