> joyce campbell >
* SUBTILIS *
My practice traverses the relatively unexamined territory between two morphologies: the science of emergent form and the genealogy of signs. As one facet of this investigation I collect bacteria and fungi and isolate and incubate those strains that exhibit exceptionally elaborate colony morphology.
My favorite micro-organism is Bacillus subtilis, a ubiquitous soil borne bacteria, distinctive because it forms coherent coloniesbuilt from chains of individual cells. A unique saw-like tail causes the migrating cells to twist in a single direction, forming elaborate, fernlike scrolls. In my attempts to depict the undepictable - organic form in the process of emergence - I have abandoned camera photography in favor of photograms.
* description *
For this project I will produce mural-scaled photographic enlargements generated by direct projection through a sample of Bacillus subtilis cultivated in agar. In this terrain of unlimited scalar clarity a kind of automatic drawing is performed as the bacteria swims through the gelatinous medium, their coiling trails mapping the invisible surface tensions that lend the medium substance. The result is an elaborately decorative self-generated abstraction that reflects my interest in surrealist automatism (Duchamp's Three Standard Stoppages, Man Ray's Dust Breeding), post-minimalist process art, and the technical photographic tradition initiated in the 19th century by Anna Atkins' botanical cyanotypes.
In response to the Garden Lab proposition, I will take full advantage of the wind-tunnel's extraordinary height, producing a single photograph approximately sixty feet long and forty inches wide. This multiple exposure photogram will be slung over a crossbar to produce an arbor of tangled vines of monstrously enlarged Bacillus subtilis for viewers to walk through. In doing so they will enter an invisible city built from bacterial colonies cultivated from the soil in Fritz Haeg's (or my own, neighboring) garden. The work evokes Jack and the Bean Stalk and Michaelangelo's The Creation of Adam in the tiniest and least flamboyant of garden flora.
> bio >
Joyce Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist working in photography, installation sculpture and time based media. She is originally from New Zealand and has lived in Los Angeles for five years. She has a Masters degree in Fine Arts with a theoretical dissertation from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, having completed one year of that degree at the University of California at San Diego. She lectures in studio art at the University of California, Irvine and California State University, Northridge and produces occasional work as a freelance curator and art writer. Joyce exhibited throughout New Zealand during the 1990's and has in the last six years has also produced much of her work in Australia and the United States. Her work was included in Every Day: The 11th Biennale of Sydney (AUS, 1998) and the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial: Screen Culture Series (AUS,1999). She was the Taranaki Artist in Residence in 2001, producing the solo installation accompanying publication Deep Down (NZ, 2001). Recent group exhibitions include The Armory Installational (USA 2002), Alternate Routes (USA, 2002), Genius Loci (USA, 2002), +64 (Germany, 2002), Dead Ringer (NZ, 2003) and Dirty Pixels (NZ 2003). She is represented by Starke White Gallery (Auckland NZ) and Paul MacNamara Gallery (Wanganui, NZ)