Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present what dreams may come, a solo exhibition of recent video works by peter campus. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the gallery, and will be on view from Saturday, April 4th, through Saturday, May 9th. An opening reception will take place on Friday, April 10th, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM, with the artist present. This exhibition will run concurrently with campus's solo museum exhibition, there somewhere, on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, through May 3rd.
For more than two decades, campus has recorded the light and changing landscapes on the South Shore of Long Island. The works in what dreams may come continue this intimate inquiry, concentrating on surface and tonal variations within a tightly bounded field of view. Called videographs, they merge the fixed frame of photography with video’s unfolding duration. What initially appears still gradually reveals movement.
Working in high resolution, campus composes each frame with precision before allowing the camera to register subtle change. Reflections shift; color deepens or cools; submerged forms appear and dissolve. The loop structure eliminates narrative progression in favor of a sustained gaze. As the image unfolds, distinctions between surface and depth become uncertain, recalling long-standing pictorial concerns while remaining distinctly time-based.
The videographs neither romanticize nor dramatize the natural world, but examine it closely as a perceptual field. By narrowing his scope, campus intensifies attention, inviting viewers into a measured encounter with light, duration, and the unstable boundary between abstraction and description.
what dreams may come gestures toward reflection and possibility. In these videographs, meaning does not announce itself; it accrues through time. What emerges is a practice grounded in observation—one in which attentiveness and introspection become the central act.
peter campus (b. 1937, New York, NY) is an influential artist in the canons of new media and video art. After receiving a Bachelor of Science in Experimental Psychology from Ohio State University in 1960, he studied at the City College Film Institute and participated in the experimental workshops at WGBH TV. campus received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976. His work has been exhibited extensively with solo shows at the Jeu de Paume, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Culturgest, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Bremen, Centre Pompidou, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, The High Museum, and University of Michigan Museum of Art. campus is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Parrish Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou, Hamburger Bahnhof – National Galerie der Gegenwart, Harvard Art Museums, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Walker Art Center, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Tate Modern.
