What / If / Then
Beth Campbell and Christina P. Day
September 10th – October 9th Artist's Reception Saturday September 17th, 6-9 PM Gallery Hours: Saturdays 1-4 PM and by appointment (Also open October 8 and 9th 12-6 PM for Philadelphia Open Studio Tours)
Mount Airy Contemporary 25 West Mt. Airy Avenue Philadelphia PA 19119 (267) 270-2787 www.mountairycontemporary.cominfo@mountairycontemporary.com
Press for this exhibition:An Uncanny Pairing, Edith Newhall, Philadelphia Inquirer 9/11/2016
MAC is pleased to present What / If / Then, an exhibition of works by Beth Campbell and Christina P. Day.
Campbell and Day play with the structural underpinnings of reality.
Campbell's investigations call to mind the Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics, where all possible states are real, existing in parallel worlds - in other words, if it could happen, it is happening. Her drawings, sculptures and videos often center on protagonists in the middle of a decision tree running forwards and backwards in time, with all possible outcomes presented simultaneously.
Day often works by distilling familiar objects to their essence, and then distorting, refracting, doubling or transforming the objects in subtle ways. The resulting works fit into this universe uncomfortably. Pattern recognition, which we depend on to interpret the world, and which instantaneously identifies so much of what surrounds us, stumbles and stutters when encountering Day's objects.
Beth Campbell, Lamps, 2011, 24 x 16 x 63 inches
Known for her drawings, sculpture, and architectural interventions, Beth Campbell creates works that challenge the notion of a physical world beyond our perception. Drawing upon philosophy, phenomenology and psychology, Campbell choreographs spaces, crafts uncanny objects, and maps thought processes.
For this exhibition Campbell will present works from her Lamp series, made during a John Michael Kohler Arts Center residency, drawings from her Future Past series, and her Mobiles.
Campbell’s commissioned projects include Following Room at the Whitney Museum of Art (2007) and Following Room (Trento) atManifesta 7, Trento, Italy (2008); Potential Store Fronts for the Public Art Fund, New York (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include Seomi Gallery, South Korea; Country Club, Chicago; The Sculpture Center, Cleveland OH; Country Club Projects at the Buck House, Los Angeles, and Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York. Other museum exhibitions include the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Greater New York, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, White Columns, the Drawing Room, London, and the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs NY. Her work is included in collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2011), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Memorial Fellowship (2009); and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2006). She has been an artist-in-residence at John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2009); the Lower East Side Printshop (2006); and Dieu Donné (2003), among others. Campbell was born in 1971 in Illinois; she lives and works in New York.
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Christina Day shifts between drawing, drafting and building and is inspired by the poetry of time captured in found material. She frequently returns to ‘match finding’ - both literally, in how repeat patterns link into one another or how two walls join on a corner, and artistically when two objects of the same make are found in different places at different times by chance. Day is interested in staging uncanny installations that heighten a viewer’s sense of what may seem familiar, but is distorted out of context.
For this exhibition Day will present several of her sculptures, including Splint, Side by Side and four of her Letterpress Poems.
Day lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Her sculptural and photographic work has been shown around the United States and abroad in Germany and South Korea since 1999. She is an alumna of the University of the Arts (BFA, Crafts/Fibers ’99) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, Fiber ’06). She has participated as a Resident Artist at Sculpture Space (2008), the Vermont Studio Center (2011), the first Haystack Open Studio Residency at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft (2013) and at RAIR in Philadelphia (2015). She is a former member of the NAPOLEON artist collective (2012-2016) and is a Knight Arts Challenge grant winner and participant for the CITYWIDE: A Collective Exhibition project, held in 2013. She teaches as an Adjunct Professor in the Crafts/Fiber Program at The University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) and will be a Full Time Professor of Fiber for the 2016-2017 academic year at the Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD). She has written articles both on her own work and in critique of others for Architecture and Ideas, based out of Carleton University (Canada) and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture (Oxford, UK).
About MACMount Airy Contemporary was founded in 2009 by co-directors Andrea Wohl Keefe and Colin Keefe. Based in northwest Philadelphia, MAC focuses on providing low key, high quality art experiences in an informal residential setting.