Texturals from the Medusa: A Walking Book
Wandering the Sansara (2′ x 3′)
Text, water color, inks, prayer papers
Take a look at a video and some images from a one-person show that Campion presented in the Ryder-Worth Gallery at the University of California at Berkeley: Texturals from the Medusa: A Walking Book. The works were hung from copper pipes and formed a labyrinth that visitors walked through. The art contained mixtures of text, inks, watercolors, oils, collage, and extended materials, on whole made paper.
* A fuller description from the show can be found at the bottom of this page. The following link (Vimeo) tracks Campion reading and and giving a guided tour of the installation.
Here’s a contact sheet of images from the show
Below are a series of thumbnail images from the installation.
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* This description was taken from the show:
TEXTURALS from MEDUSA
(A WALKING BOOK)
The Dept. of Art Practice and (Worth Ryder Gallery in Kroeber Hall on UC Berkeley campus) is pleased to present this installation from June 8th—June 26th. The Gallery is free to the public
Campion’s poem Medusa was the third in a series of book-length poems—along with Tongue Stones and Squaring the Circle. These books lay the foundations of his ecotropic philosophy—which argues that for human culture to be healthy, it must exist in an ecological niche.
In Medusa, the ancient myth finds contemporary expression, as ‘Everyman’ (suffering in a world of political surveillance) finds himself in psychotherapy for his personal and transpersonal offenses against ‘women’, ‘the other’, and the ‘earth’. In this work, the doctor (left margin) and patient (right margin) may assume ‘other’ identities (e.g. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza); sometimes they exchange roles and places on the page. Centered between them, conceptually AND on the page, another voice (Taoist or anti-Taoist) imparts the transmuting medicine our sickness needs.
The TEXTURALS from the MEDUSA in this exhibition are largely drawn from this middle ground, but not exclusively. The first line of text from each Textural affords its title. These works (2’ x 3’) contain text on custom-made papers as well as watercolors, Buddhist prayer papers, other papers, inks, acrylics, metals, glues, embedded objects, etceteras utilizing a variety of application techniques. The Texturals are presented in rows to enable the viewer to experience and ‘read’ the show walking through it. This is intended to emphasize the poetic rather than the painterly aspect of the work, which is both natural and necessary. The copper pipes, from which the Texturals hang, reinforce both the flow of the presentation and of nature itself. I hope they suggest the serpentine nature of the Medusa and expose the symbiotic underpinnings of the earth.