Image: Brian Scott Campbell, Harbor, Flashe on canvas, 20 x 16” (50.5 x 40.5 cm), 2019
Artist: Brian Scott Campbell
Exhibition title: Like A Ship
Venue: Harbinger Project Space, Reykjavík, Iceland
Date: August 12 – 31, 2019
Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Harbinger Project Space, Reykjavík
Harbinger Project Space is pleased to present, Like A Ship, a solo exhibition from Texas-based artist, Brian Scott Campbell. Featuring ten new paintings that were made during the summer of 2019 in Iceland. These small-scale flashe on canvas works depict abstracted landscapes populated by trees, mountains, rolling farmland, and bodies of water. The works are primarily in grayscale and punctuated by small amounts of flat color. The thinly textured paint and loose chalky black outlines create a sense of play and movement to an otherwise motionless scene. The paintings revive familiar motifs, remaining rooted in conventions of foreground and background, yet they are distinguished by personal iconography and bold child-like abstraction, whereby gravity, scale, and reality are provoked. Campbell pushes form, line, and now color to create collision-like exchanges of symbols and shapes within an unhinged landscape. Like A Ship suggests a hidden comparison to another secret object, feeling, or transient space. The images in this exhibition unfold like chapters taken from a travel diary, yet they remain emblematic, folkloric, and psychological.
Brian Scott Campbell (b. 1983, Columbus, OH, USA) received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design, OH and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, NJ. Campbell has exhibited widely including shows at Dutton, New York; Fredericks & Freiser, New York; Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut (Curated by Suzanne Geiss Co. New York); Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles; Ms Barbers; Los Angeles; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Circuit 12; Dallas, TX; David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen; NADA New York and Untitled Miami Beach Art Fairs among others. Awards and residencies include Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency with artist Dana Schutz; a McColl Center for Visual Art Full Fellowship; a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and The Artist in the Marketplace Program, Bronx Museum, New York. Campbell has curated numerous exhibitions, including ‘Paradise Sauna’ at Tiger Strikes Asteroids Los Angeles, ‘Zing Zam Blunder’ at Harbinger Project Space in Reykjavík, Iceland, and ‘As If A Field Could Become Some Dream’ at No Place Gallery, Columbus, Ohio, (Organized in collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts). Campbell’s work has been reviewed in Modern Painters / Blouin ArtInfo; Whitehot Magazine; Los Angeles Times; CARLA LA, The Huffington Post; Hyperallergic; Two Coats of Paint; Art Viewer; and i-D Magazine / Vice, amongst others.