Michael Campbell, The Janice May, 2007, aluminum, brass, copper, driftwood, steel, tin. Collection of the artist
Exhibitions
Michael Campbell
Field Recordings of Icebergs Melting
Samuel J. Zacks and
Contemporary Feature Galleries
23 May - 16 August
Lethbridge artist Michael Campbell’s latest technosculptural installation fuses the utopian zeal of space fiction with the dreamy yearnings of beachcomber craft. The flotilla of sweetly inventive driftwood spaceships in Field Recordings of Icebergs Melting reads as a diorama of some future (or past) migration. Through nested allusions to Victorian-era adventure narratives, 20th-century industrial salvage and the vast upheavals wrought by our planet’s history of climate change, Campbell offers a wry consideration of the implacable cycles in which the human project is snared.
A publication documenting Michael Campbell: Field Recordings of Icebergs Melting, co-produced by the Art Centre with the Esplanade Gallery, Medicine Hat, and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, will be released in autumn 2009.
Jan Allen