Until June 17, 2018, the Chronus Art Center presents “The Flickering Uncertain” by Jim Campbell & ZHANG Peili, an exhibition by two pioneers of new media art, and the first solo show for the San Francisco based artist in China.
Although strikingly heterogeneous, the affinity between the two artists lies implicitly in their shared interest in invoking an aesthetic experience by employing “low resolution” both as a visual device and as a perceptual agent, rendering an embodied looking/seeing, seeking to grasp the technological and psychological intricacies of reality.
Like much of Campbell’s work, perception is contingent on distance and, according to an inverted logic, the closer one approaches the object in question, the more illusive it becomes. In the shadowy grisaille of « Exploded View and Exploded Flat », Campbell implicates a kind of silent reverberation, changing one’s distance makes the flickering object ambiguous or perceptible.
On the other hand, departing from his screen-based practice, ZHANG Peili’s « Collision of Harmonies » for the first time employs sound as a kinetic apparatus to activate machine collisions for an operatic climax. Instead of human-machine interactions and a viewing pace hinged on proximity, here the dramatic encounter of two megaphones from opposite side of a hanging rail gradually approaching each other singing a duet of female and male voices and causing a pile of neon tubes to flare and extinguish until the two megaphones come to a stand-off midway, exploding into a thundering abstraction and dazzlingly white light as if the harmony is pixelated into fragments of destruction.
More information here
1/ ZHANG Peili: Collision of Harmanies. Installation view. @ Photo: Boers Li Gallery
2/ Jim Campbell: Light Topography (Jane’s Pool) @ Photo: Espacio Fundacion Telefonica
