Text Memory
Friday, April 25 – Sunday, June 1, 2008
“Text Memory” is comprised of two full-room instillations, The Last Days in the Beginning of March by Jim Campbell and Want (continuous) by Mark Scheeff. Both instillations use illumination and text to create poignant imagery.
In The Last Days in the Beginning of March, Campbell creates an immersive space that fabricates reality through the innovative use of light, memory, and text. The gallery ceiling is adorned with thirty custom made lights that create rhythmic light patterns on the floor and each pool of light is monitored to reflect the pulse of a previously recorded event. The fluctuating light sequence is complimented with wall text that defines each specific event and provides a narrative framework for the piece. The Last Day in the Beginning of March is a poetic blend of reality and fiction that is intended to chronicle the last days in someone’s life.
Mark Scheeff also provides a glimpse into human emotions in his instillation, Want (continuous). Scheeff places three spotlights on the gallery ceiling and leaves the room pitch black, creating the illusion of a stage. Thermal receipt printers will drop 1’’ by 3’’ paper slips from the ceiling that contain textual ads representing collective desires. Information was gathered from online personal ads, online prayer sites, and from a database of individuals waiting for an organ transplants—these incarnations of want reflect the universal longing for love, security, and health. The fluttering rain of paper accumulates throughout the duration of the exhibit and slowly fills the space with traces of how life could be different.
Both Campbell and Scheeff will be at the Wood Street Galleries on April 26 at 1 p.m. to further describe their distinct pieces in an Artist Talk.
Jim Campbell has shown his work internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.
He was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978.
Mark Scheeff’s sculpture and installation work combines the physical and the computational. His work repurposes his background in engineering (with its emphasis on utility, societal progress and technical mastery) to investigate a set of questions not normally addressed by these skills and attitudes.
As a research engineer, he has built robots that are social with people. These robots used lifelike gesture and facial expressions to portray emotion and respond to humans in their vicinity. He also has built countless instruments for scientists studying materials, biology, high energy physics and nano-science.
He was born in 1969, raised in California, and has B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
Wood Street Galleries are located at 601 Wood Street above the T-Station in downtown Pittsburgh’s Cultural District, the Galleries are FREE and open to the public Tuesday-Thursday, 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m. For more information, call Wood Street Galleries at (412) 471-5605 or visit www.woodstreetgalleries.org
Support for Wood Street Galleries has been provided by the Howard Heinz
Endowment and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Additional support provided by
the Port Authority of Allegheny County and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
