JESSICA CAMPBELL
Interview Beatrice Grenier Art Jessica Campbell Photos Field Projects and James Prinz
A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN EATING A SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE DIP QUESADILLA at Field Projects in New York
Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. In her recent solo exhibition Chicago Works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Campbell draws on elements of the life of iconic Canadian painter Emily Carr as well as her own. In the exhibition, the biographies of the two artists (both born in Victoria, British Columbia) intersect in various narratives that take the format of comics, carpet paintings and drawings. The critically acclaimed exhibition touched upon issues of gender in art history all the while bearing a poignant commentary on the medium of painting.
Résidence met up with Jessica in New York who was in town for the opening of her exhibition at Field Projects Gallery, A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN EATING A SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE DIP QUESADILLA. After several attempts to find a quiet location (which is always a challenge in the city) we sat down to discuss her recent and upcoming projects. We found her humour and candour contagious.
At Field Projects Gallery (on view until October 26, 2019), Campbell presents a new series of carpet paintings. Rendered in a cartoon aesthetic, the colorful carpet works blend together foreground and background at times blurring the subject matter. The artist’s treatment of scenes of daily life cleverly touches upon various tropes in the history of painting.
BG: Congratulations on your exhibition at Field Projects Gallery. Is this your first exhibition in New York?
JC: I have been in group shows before in New York but this is my first solo presentation.
BG: How did your show at Field Projects Gallery come about?
JC: Fields Project is an artist-run space in Chelsea and one of the directors of the Gallery reached out to me in 2016 after my first book came out called Hot or Not 20th Century Male Artists (a graphic non fiction novel in which I guess whether 20th century canonical artists were hot based on their artwork). And he really liked the book and asked to propose something for their space. In addition to making comics I make fibers and I had just started [working with this medium] around that time period so instead of proposing a comics show which is what he anticipated, I proposed to do a series of carpet paintings. That’s what I call them.
« I developed a way of working that is kind of unique and I don’t think a trained fibers person would work this way because it is… well… probably a bad technique! It has been interesting and freeing. »
BG: I want to point that out that—it is really interesting that you call works like those currently on view at Field Projects Gallery “carpet paintings.” It seems that leading up to the carpet painting itself, there is a drawing process involved in your practice—how does the terminology distinguish between concepts in your practice?
JC: When I started using carpet, I initially had the carpets on the ground and they kind of went along with installations of drawings or paintings or other wall works and there was this really clear divide between what goes on the wall and on the floor. I had the idea of making imagery with carpets and in the first pieces I did, the carpet is cut and collaged onto wood panels so its not a tufted rug which it kind of what it looks like. They are more like mosaics! And the first ones I did were collages onto old paintings from grad school. I had all these wooden panels that I had painted on and were not functioning so I started collaging carpet on top of them and the first ones I did were a hybrid between painting and carpet so there is both on the surface—I might go back to that. This is how the term came about. And they function just like paintings: they hang on the wall, they are made on them, they share the same size. So the language was really built around that. It is true that they very much start with drawing: I will do a quick sketch and after that will draw with a crayon or sharpie on the wooden panel and then use the outline for a collage. I did study painting at Concordia University in Montreal and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and during those years I was painting exclusively. When I got out of grad school, painting felt so heavy and bogged down with the weight of history and the voices of my teachers in my head telling me what to do and what not to do. So using other material like carpet—I don't have any background in textiles or fibers—had felt very free. I could invent how to use the material and be free to make mistakes. I also developed a way of working that is kind of unique and I don't think a trained fibers person would work this way because it is… well… probably a bad technique! It has been interesting and freeing. Like acrylic, carpet is a pigmented plastic, in the end it is just adhered differently…
BG: You mentioned the weight of history in painting—one piece in particular shown in your exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (Congratulations on this one, too!), A Century of Progress (2018), is also related to your book Hot or Not 20th Century Male Artists. Tell us more about this piece and how the idea for it came about?
JC: Well first, the show is largely built around the life and work of Emily Carr, who is “famous in Canada” and from my hometown Victoria, BC (she was born in the 1870s and died in the 1940s). That rug, A Century of Progress, was in the room that references the only time she came to Chicago in 1933. She had come to see the World Fair, an exhibition that was happening at the Art Institute of Chicago called A Century of Progress. It was meant to be this celebration of the first century of Chicago’s history and supposedly had “the greatest artworks in the world” according to the curators. Carr took the train down and arrived in Chicago after the show closed and did not get to see it. She hated Chicago, had a bad time during her visit. What I did in the rug [A Century of Progress] was reproduce female nudes painted by men that were in that historical exhibition. To complement that, there were some very intimate drawings on the walls that reproduced some of her diary drawing and cartoons—you had to walk up closely to them to be able to see. In turn, to do that you had to walk across the work of these great male artists. She was also rumoured to be lesbian and that was interesting to me—as an art student she was very prudish, if there was a nude model she would leave. But she would draw from nude sculptures and paintings. So I was thinking about that a lot with this rug.
Scarf Shopping, Acrylic rug on panel, 2019
« There was a great review of the show in Hyperallergic, that was very positive about the exhibition but kind of dissed Emily Carr—“the boring landscape paintings, etc.” In Canada, there are lots of problems with Emily Carr especially in the postcolonial revision of her work. But still, that felt a bit sacrilegious—what! Boring paintings! »
BG: How did the audience in Chicago respond to your citation of the Canadian art historical canon?
JC: They were occasionally people who were aware. The Chief Curator of the MCA, Michael Darling, used to be a curator in Seattle at the Seattle Art Museum—I think people who live on the West Coast tend to be more familiar with her work. Some Canadian expats in Chicago were also familiar with her work. But for the most part, a lot of people had never heard of her. And in fact there was a great review of the show in Hyperallergic, that was very positive about the exhibition but kind of dissed Emily Carr—“the boring landscape paintings, etc.” In Canada, there are lots of problems with Emily Carr especially in the postcolonial revision of her work. But still, that felt a bit sacrilegious—what! Boring paintings! But seriously, it is not a show I would have done in Canada probably because it seems like part of what was interesting to me was this deep dive into Canadiana… and also because I am homesick!
BG: Are you!? Are there things that you find alienating about the art world in the U.S.?
JC: I’m totally homesick! I have been here for seven years… I was in BC, then in Montreal, then in Chicago. A lot of my art historical references became sort of moot when I moved here. No one is talking about The Group of Seven or The Automatistes or any of that stuff here. They are not aware that they ever existed. So that was interesting, not necessarily off-putting. There is just this whole other art historical canon—and I am aware of the American one because American culture dominates the world… but! There are regionally specific things, such as the Chicago Imagists, which I love and was not aware of before coming here. I’m otherwise homesick of the geography of Canada, the ocean, the mountains. And even Montreal—which is such a fascinating unique city it is hard not to miss it. […] But in terms of the art world, it is a great time to be an artist, there is so much to be done and so much one can draw from.
BG: How do you decide upon a topic you want to work on? How do you establish boundaries for your subject matter?
JC: That’s a very interesting question! In the exhibition at the MCA, there were a lot of parameters that I set for myself and there was a lot of research, which I love! I love art history and research. After that, I planned to do an exhibition around an earlier Twentieth Century feminist group in New York called Heterodoxy, which was formed by writers, doctors, academics, and really powerful women of that time period—people like Margaret Sanger who founded Planned Parenthood etc. […] So I wanted to make an exhibition that centered around that but I could not decide what it should look like. All the visual manifestations did not do it justice or seemed too much on the surface so instead, at Field Projects Gallery, I made an exhibition that is more about scenes from everyday life referencing tropes in the history of painting. There is one piece for example that is a woman looking into a mirror, obviously a big trope in art history and other scenes of everyday life. And that was another way to delimit my subject matter. Another series I just did is all still lives, and those will be on view at Expo Chicago in a week.
Eating Cheesies off of the Couch, Acrylic rug on panel, 2019. Photograph by James Prinz
BG: Is it possible that you will go back to painting?
JC: Yeah! I would like to—I think the next step is that I want to incorporate painting back into the carpet painting. I am also working on a graphic novel right now—it is still in the very early stages and will probably take a couple of years but it is about a teenage girl that is caught in between the evangelical church that she goes to and her public school and discovering her sexuality and beliefs and dealing with adolescence. I still have a lot of work to do on it but I want to eventually move in between those things. I was focused on these two exhibitions and the art fair and now that they are done, I’ll have more freedom to play around. I am also doing a residency in South Dakota for a month—Stuart Artist-in-Residence for South Dakota State University’s School of Design. They have a small art department and gallery and studio that I can use so it is amazing! It is such a nice thing to be in this residency where I don't have any real requirements. I can do what I want!
BG: Did your time in Montreal influence you in terms of the development of your graphic novels?
JC: Yes! I worked for Drawn & Quarterly, a comic book publisher, where I started doing publicity and then moved into the editorial production side of things and I always loved comics and working there solidified my taste. It was a great education in comics. I did not make them while working there because it was too intimidating. They’re publishing the greatest cartoonists in the world! I couldn’t have let Lynda Berry see my terrible comics. So it wasn't until I left that I started making comics and felt less ashamed! But in grad school it was a great outlet because I found that a lot of my advisors were painters or artists who maybe appreciated comics but did not necessarily have the background to feel comfortable talking about them so I felt this release where I could do this “secret work” that no one knew how to talk about... People were just like “Cool!” “Keep doing it!” Without necessarily giving critical feedback.
BG: Finally, a more personal question, do you think you will go back to Canada?
JC: That's a good question, which my husband and I talk about a lot! It’s hard! I did not intend to stay here this long, but now, I met someone and we are figuring things out with families across the continent, so we’ll see!
« At Field Projects Gallery, I made an exhibition that is more about scenes from everyday life referencing tropes in the history of painting. »
Jessica is currently the Stuart Artist-in-Residence for South Dakota State University’s School of Design.
Her work was featured at EXPO Chicago in the EXPOSURE section of the fair curated by Naima J. Keith.
A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN EATING A SPINACH AND ARTICHOKE DIP QUESADILLA at Field Projects in New York is curated by Jacob Rhodes and is on view until October 26th, 2019