Exhibitions : 2013
Description:
Shield
Join us for the artist's reception on Thursday, September 26, from 7 - 9 pm
Artist in Attendance
Shields are beautiful, dangerous, decorative, industrious and specific to an era. They display power
and control. They invite risk and daring. In a painting, they impose a historicity, and in these works,
an elasticity of time and place. The shields in these paintings, whether placed on, or hidden behind
the figure, or drawn on a t-shirt, are derived from art historical references - mostly Klimt’s paintings
and El Anatsui’s bottle cap murals. At the same time, the echoed figures, sometimes just a
shadow, work through repetition to circumvent the mind’s inability to hold a memory or a picture still
long enough to remember it exactly the same way twice. Moreover, there is a concept in
neuroscience, called reconsolidation, which was examined in the Nader experiments at NYU in
2000, that looked at the idea that there is no true immutable, perfectly intact memory of a thing. The
repetitive echoes, therefore, are a different kind of shield and protection of the visual in a memory.
Carolyn Campbellcompleted her MFA in painting in 2004, an Honours Arts History Degree in 1994
and a BFA in 1987, from the University of Alberta. Carolyn has had numerous group and solo
exhibitions and has shown her work throughout Canada in Edmonton, Calgary, Kingston and
Toronto. Her work was purchased twice for the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2006, 2011). In
2009 she was a finalist for the Kingston Prize National Portrait Competition. Carolyn has won
several academic awards in painting and has been frequently reviewed. She is an Associate Dean
at the University of Alberta and she currently teaches a strategy course in arts administration in the
MBA program. She was a sessional instructor in painting and design at the University of Alberta,
and has been a guest speaker and visiting artist at the Banff Centre, and the University of British
Columbia, Okanagan. Her work is represented by the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton, and the
Willock and Sax Gallery in Banff, Alberta, and has been shown at the Art Gallery of Alberta.
Carolyn recently served on the Mayor’s Task Force for the Future of Arts and Culture in Edmonton and has
just been appointed to the Premier’s Council on Culture.