Los Angeles Art Vernacular: Rebecca Campbell: Nostalgic Dreaming

Rebecca Campbell, Daddy Daughter Date, 2009.

During our class discussion of contemporary painters last week, I was reminded of a Los Angeles-based Artist, Rebecca Campbell, whose work I saw last February at LA Louver Gallery in Venice. The show that I saw was entitled Poltergeist, and featured Campbell's works that focused on childhood memories and nostalgia of growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Among an installation of a giant, velvet covered avocado tree with blue birds perched atop its branches, and gold-plated bees strung from the ceiling (seen below), Poltergeist featured a collection of haunting paintings both life-like and seemingly dreamy, which transported the viewer back into Campbell's dusty, religious, and hazy childhood. The opening image of this entry, Daddy Daughter Date, features a young Campbell staring at her father seated in a recliner, his body illuminated from the glow of the television. One gathers a sense of loss or nostalgic longing from the painting, a combination of the melancholy color palate and cold, impartial distance between father and child. Similar paintings in the show feature bleak images of street lamps and telephone lines, rendering the city a quiet, almost deadly place.

Campbell's work returns painting to the figural and realistic, but is not quite the same rendering of the female nude as neo-expressionists attempted to harken back to in their attempts to recapture traditional painting styles. While Campbell is clearly trained in formal, painterly elements of accurate shadowing, depth perception, etc., she does not allow these qualities to hinder her voice in the painting, and creates works that clearly speak of her conflicted memories associated with Salt Lake City.