With his new work at Cristin Tierney, peter campus, who avoids uppercase lettering, sets boldly expressive new standards for his “videographs”—videos recorded with a stationary camera, like moving photographs—which began in 2007 as modest manipulations of pixels in everyday landscapes. The four videographs in what dreams may come feature watery landscapes of Eastern Long Island displayed on enlarged flat screens; they offer intimate views of the workings of the video medium and its links to subjective vision. What, indeed, does video look like? It’s appropriate that the videos on view, running in eight to twelve-minute loops, involve water—an immersive, reflective medium.
The exhibition is buttressed by a concurrent installation at the Philips Collection in Washington, DC, there somewhere, curated by John G. Hanhardt, who combines four recent videographs with Head of a Man with Death on His Mind from 1978, a large video projection in black-and-white. A comprehensive catalogue includes both a lengthy artist’s statement and an essay by Hanhardt that surveys campus’s career, from his projections of heads to projected images of small stones collected on his outdoor expeditions, which conflate the cosmic and personal. Telescoping decades of technical, aesthetic, and spiritual evolution, the juxtaposition points to campus’s enduring concern with selfhood. The show at Cristin Tierney affirms this trajectory, lending more dramatic scale and ambition to campus’s union of technological refinement and subjective vision. While his powerful 4K UHD technology enables us to discern tiny bubbles afloat in crystalline liquids and delicate insects skimming on the surface, his images resist full disclosure, as if retaining a hidden, personal content.
