TAMMI CAMPBELL

Pushing her practice of replication, wrapping, desire, and deception, Campbell again dons the art historical canon as armature and challenge for As Long As It Lasts. For the first time she presents a diminutive and suggestively re-scaled Lawrence Weiner, the ‘unmade’ date paintings of On Kawara, and a fallen column of stacked Empire Bricks by Carl Andre. Taking from her decentred feminist lens perspective, Campbell’s work notes how totemic male artists dominate institutional, collection, and market narratives despite decades of powerful waves of decolonisation and feminist critique.

Starting with an extensive research period bordering on forensic, she dives deeply into the materials and processes of the artist she decides to appropriate. Her ‘recreations’ of Kawara’s Today series anticipate the city where he was originally traveling based on available data in catalogues and archives. Then making her best guess, Campbell fills in only the unaccounted for dates when Kawara did not complete a painting. Her paintings are, of course, paintings. The newspapers lining the boxes are also entirely constructed of paint, and the boxes, though made from a white matboard substrate, have been painted to recreate the look and texture of book board that Kawara used to contain his date paintings.

Campbell’s expression rests between several moving points. The gesture of selection, our recognition of these works and their original contexts; the viewer’s suspended state of anticipation waiting for the work to be unmasked; and the caveat that the entire work is a trompe l’oeil illusion. She withholds and repackages the readymade of Modernism itself.

Her technical ability to simulate packing materials, including bubble wrap, tape, and cardboard, and now for the first time sheets of foam, through ingenious combinations of acrylic paints and mediums is alchemical. Each element is obsessively considered. Campbell will go as far as mimicking processes of time, foxing, and sun fading before she proceeds to the final step: the wrapping. Baldessari’s Pure Beauty, Warhol’s Double Elvis, and Ruscha’s text drawings are now held in plastic and swaddled in foam sarcophaguses. Transformation too, is continuously in play. She reverses course with Twombly’s oil and white wax crayon “chalkboard” painting, rendering her replication in actual chalk on blackboard.

Campbell’s appropriative practice comes out of a lineage of artists, such as Sturtevant, Sherri Levine, and Louise Lawler, who have employed appropriation to compelling ends. There is a nod to institutional critique in the desire to literally ‘package up’ and put away these works into storage to make room for women or lesser recognised artists, while simultaneously unable to escape the visibility of the canon. Cheekily, Campbell’s works raises questions about institutional structures, the canon, and systems of invisible labor used to validate those histories.

Tammi Campbell (b. 1974, Calgary, Alberta) received her BFA from the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon. Recent solo exhibitions include Exactly Wrong, MAKI Gallery, Tokyo; Boring Art, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; and On View, Blouin Division, Montréal, QC. Campbell has also exhibited her work across Canada and the U.S. including Arsenal, New York, NY; Gavlak, Los Angeles, CA; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, SK; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, B.C.; and the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal, QC. She participated in the Canadian Biennale 2014 at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, as well as the 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-St-Paul. Campbell lives and works in Montréal, Quebec.