June 9 – August 19, 2023
Artists Space is pleased to present Ode to the Underloved, the first New York institutional solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer Crystal Z Campbell.
In their work, Campbell performs critical excavations of history. Drawing on archival research, they find complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but left unspoken. Campbell’s films use collage, oral histories, sonic recordings, and what the artist terms “underloved” archival material to examine historical gaps and to shape new frameworks for translating and transmitting the past. Exploring structural violence and displacement, Campbell’s work moves dynamically between metaphor and reality to foreground acts of omission, failures of collective memory, and sociopolitical narratives.
For their exhibition at Artists Space, Campbell has created an architectural environment around their latest experimental film REVOLVER (2022). REVOLVER takes up the notion of pareidolia—the phenomenon of seeing patterns or images where none exist—through the narration of a descendant of the Exodusters, Black Americans who fled to Kansas to escape the violence and discrimination of the Reconstruction Era South. To produce the film, Campbell traveled to the historically Black township of Nicodemus, Kansas, to interview it’s resident historian, Angela Bates, whose ancestors were among the town’s original settlers in 1877. Nicodemus, a small, unincorporated hamlet in rural Graham County with a population of less than ten, is the only remaining western town established by Black Americans during the Reconstruction Period following the Civil War.
REVOLVER’s soundtrack interweaves thumping pulses of harsh industrial music with excerpts of an interview Campbell conducted with Bates recounting early memories, visions, and dreams to suggest both a personal and political psychic geography. At one point, Campbell overlays their modulated rendition of an acapella riff on Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog. The first to record the song, Thornton’s sonic legacy was eclipsed by the massive subsequent success of Elvis’s version, which became a pop hit and undermined Thornton’s earlier, groundbreaking work.
REVOLVER’s visuals focus on mesmerizing geometries in a state of both constant transformation and rotational movement. Campbell constructed these seemingly abstract forms from undisclosed personal artifacts, objects, and traces of their own life. Inspired by a visit to the Herman Rorschach archive in Switzerland, the film is not unlike the abstract inkblot forms used during a Rorschach test. In the gallery, the video is projected from above onto the ground, surrounded by a walkway that provides viewers a surveilling pathway. By casting an unstable image as a perceptual landscape across a wide expanse of gallery floor, Ode to the Underloved foregrounds the abstract and sensorial in counterpoint to historical narrative.
