Review: Jill Campoli’s VESSEL at Little Field
Posted by: Lisa Radon on Oct 31, 2009 at 02:00PM
3 Comments
Jill Campioli. VESSEL. (detail) Little Field.
View Slideshow » Illustration:Jill Campioli VESSEL at Little Field
View Slideshow » Illustration:Jill Campioli. VESSEL. (detail).
That human=breath vessel at the base of it is at the base of Jill Campoli’s VESSEL at her Little Field exhibition space which doesn’t say nearly enough about this two-channel video installation. VESSEL had the power to project itself from a side alley onto the hum of a Last Thursday via a giant mouth hovering above the space, breathing in and blowing out, drawing viewers into the alley and out of the fray. And it had the power that only something very quiet has with its stillness that is not stillness, the body doing nothing but what it does dumbly: breathe.
Campoli busted out of the vessel of the diminuitive, hundred-year-old garage that is Little Field with an improvised circular screen on the roof of the garage for the projection of the mouth while in the dark space itself, video of a male torso visibly inhaling and exhaling was projected on a floor-to-ceiling tube giving the flat projection a bit of dimensionality. The viewer was faced with the choice to stand well back to be able to see both projections, putting great distance between viewer and piece, or to approach the body at human scale and lose sight of the whole. VESSEL is the first work I’ve seen of Campoli’s, and I’m curious to see more.
REVISED: Jill’s surname now spelled correctly thanks to the ultimate fact-checker…her mom! Thanks Mom!
I was not able to be at the event at Little Field and your description of the exhibit has left me wishing I had been there. It is a concept of art I have never been exposed to and sounds mystifying and culturally challenging as a look at what is natural and overlooked.
By the way – it’s Campoli – not Campioli. And, yes, I’m Jill’s mother and live on the east coast and so wait for the critic’s comments of Little Field as my only window into her art. Thank you for your comments.
Sandra, I wish you could have seen it. You’d have been proud! I’m embarrassed about getting your surname wrong. Thanks for setting me straight. I’m imagining we’ll all be writing more about Jill’s work in future…best we spell her name correctly.
This was fun; Jill had described to me previously her desire to “breathe life into the space.” Far from being an obscure, overthought overture introducing people to Little Field, Jill’s simple, soft bellows of life invited one over, as Lisa described. Once there, her art revealed dimensionality unimagined even by the artist. I love this aspect of art. One viewer pointed out that the torso inside, as it expanded, was clearly male, but as it exhaled, the particular angles of shadows and light caused it to appear more swollen- breasted: female. What a mind twist: a body alternately, ceaselessly, naturally cycling between femaleness and maleness. What I saw, standing inside the cylinder of the torso (there was a slit in the back for entry) was, in the forms of shadows, two upstretched- arms dancing figures moving towards each other, again, as natural as a single person’s taking in, letting out, over and over, reinforcing the cyclic nature of being alive. Thanks for reviewing this Lisa; it deserved notice.