Rebecca Campbell

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L.A. Louver is pleased to present Rebecca Campbell: Infinite Density, Infinite Light. This expansive exhibition brings together work from the last three years that delves into hidden histories and revels in the wonders of creation and young life. Over 20 paintings are complemented by a multimedia sculpture installation. The title of the show comes from a succinct definition of a black hole; its seemingly contradictory attributes of density and light expanding to describe the beauty and fragility of life in our current moment.

With bravura painting technique, Campbell investigates her own family history, revealing the changing nature of relationships over time and space through a reimagining of found images. Family portraits and Polaroid snapshots are enlarged in a kind of excavation of past and potential selves. Details out of time and place push forward into the compositions. The bride in To Have and To Hold dissolves into de Kooning-esque abstraction, in an exploration of both postwar ideas around femininity and womanhood and the artist’s own revelatory experiences with de Kooning’s work. Elsewhere, traditional Campbell family Scottish plaid envelops figures out of snapshot photos, alluding to family feuds both recent and ancient.

Several of the paintings have been executed in subtle monochrome, a lush oil rendering of the black and white of old photographs. Beautiful Boy captures the nostalgia of a family snapshot, while also allowing distinct passages of abstraction to flourish in the background. The gallery will be bisected by To the One I Love Best, a multimedia installation incorporating historical documents, archival letters, and personal ephemera that reflects on the malleability of history and identity.

The present asserts itself in luminous paintings of the artist’s own children, shown in close, loving detail or as small seekers in grand, lush landscapes. These most recent works revel in the wonder of childhood, and the power to be found in discovering the world for the first time. There is a tension here, too, between the Edenic landscapes within the paintings and the knowledge of societal bluster—in the form of pandemic, social unrest, and political upheaval—we know is beyond the frame. Campbell distills the intensity of the current moment by capturing its opposite; the grand beauty of wild places presented as the inverse of the deep anxieties of the recent past. By powerfully channeling the tumult of the last administration, Campbell transforms the political into the deeply personal, culminating in this substantial new body of work.

Rebecca Campbell was born and raised in Salt Lake City, the youngest of seven children in a strict Mormon family. Campbell earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. Over the past two decades Campbell’s paintings have been exhibited across the United States, from California to New York, Vermont and Florida, to Ohio, Utah, Colorado and Oregon, and overseas in Madrid, Spain, and Basel, Switzerland.

In 2016, Campbell was featured in Dreams of Another Time, a two-person exhibition with Samantha Fields, curated by Kristina Newhouse at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. That same year, a solo exhibition of Campbell’s work, The Potato Eaters, travelled from the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California to Brigham Young University Museum of Art, Provo, Utah. Rebecca Campbell: A 20 Year Survey will open at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College, Costa Mesa, California in 2022, accompanied by a comprehensive exhibition catalogue.