Press Release
May 27, 2008 Contact: Caro d’Offay 773-235-7400
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 14, 6-10 pm Caro d’Offay Gallery hosts an opening reception for Fred Camper.
This exhibition includes examples from Fred Camper’s Accretions, Details, and Permutations series. These collections of juxtaposed photographs encourage viewers to refute our society’s consumerist, object-worshipping culture, allowing us to cast aside subjective preferences, to interact with multiple interconnections and discover new ways to perceive.
Through image selection, composition, and juxtaposition, successive sheets offer opportunities for deepening levels of awareness, drawing the viewer through expanding perspectives.
Tom Gunning, professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, has written, "Fred Camper's photographs explore a place through space and time as they move from one image to the next, pulling us with them. Neither strictly cinematic, nor simply a series of individual images, they draw on both stillness and motion to create a pathway of sight."
An example of this “pathway” can be found in Camper’s Details series. Details 1: Largo Argentina, Rome, a series depicting ancient ruins in Rome's center in Sheet 0, with later sheets containing more and more images, resulting in additional vantage points, growing fuzzier due to fragmentation and enlargement, until ancient Roman columns, resident cats, balconies, and storefront signs become a hazy sub-structure illuminating the artificial and arbitrary nature of digital photography and the indistinct details from which all images are constructed.
Another example of Camper’s perspective shifts can be seen in his Accretions series, consisting of six to eleven sheets of paper. Accretions 6: Niemeyer, Niteroi (image) depicting Oscar Niemeyer's famous round Niteroi Contemporary Art Museum in Niteroi, Brazil. Camper's compositions and juxtapositions illuminate the ways in which Niemeyer relates his forms to the adjacent water and the distant mountains. Camper’s Niteroi series expounds on his own perspective of Neimeyer’s relationship to the architecture/environment dialogue, while going further to reveal associations that might exist outside of our usual spectrum of senses.
Camper's latest exploration of perspective shifts can be seen in Colors 1: Transitions, consisting of large, 44 X 57, sheets with grids of 256 solid-color rectangles. Each sheet moves in the smallest possible increment from one color to another, the final product revealing the nature of digital printing and the limitations of human sight.
Fred Camper eared a bachelor of science in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, before coursework toward Master of Arts and doctorate degrees in cinema studies at New York University. Camper has published extensive criticism on film and art, writing for the Chicago Reader since 1986, and has lectured on and curated film programs throughout the world.
D’Offay has invited Camper to host 3 events during the exhibit, to create a dialogue with the gallery mission “to explore complex, interacting systems” within the exhibiting space.
Saturday, June 21, at 4 pm - Gallery talk by Camper, including a description of his various interests from painting, music, cinema, architecture, science, mathematics, wilderness travel, and bicycling, which are all influences on the present work.
Friday, June 27, at 9:30 pm, - A selection of 16mm silent films by Stan Brakhage will be screened by Camper and is followed by a talk about Brakhage's work and its effect on his own.
Friday, August 1, 10 pm - Camper will show his rarely-screened, nearly two hour silent super-8 film, SN, (1976-1984) just after the closing reception. More on SN: (http://www.fredcamper.com/F/SN.html).
Caro d’Offay Gallery is located at 2204 W. North Avenue. Gallery hours: 1-6, Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday.
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