An interview with Jessica Campbell
by Claire Voon
With a distinct voice largely shaped by a sharp sense of humor, Jessica Campbell has developed a diverse artistic practice that incorporates painting, performance art, and comics. Hailing from Canada, she moved in 2012 from Quebec to Chicago, where she still resides, to receive her MFA in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has since exhibited work at numerous galleries but also nurtures a busy career as a comic artist, spreading ink to brazenly wrestle with gender politics. Her delightfully amusing comic book, Hot or Not: 20th-Century Male Artists (2016), pokes fun at traditions of the male gaze by inviting readers to rate male artists on their hotness. This month she released a graphic novel, XTC69, a zany sci-fi tale that tackles issues of misogyny with absurdity and wit. We spoke about her ongoing solo show at Western Exhibitions, who dis, which features six works she calls “carpet paintings” — funny, curious scenes on painted canvases dressed in plush fabric. It offers an enticing preview of her first solo museum exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, which opens in December and will feature about two dozen carpet panels, some of which have never before been exhibited.
Region > Chicago, Illinois
May 26, 2018
Jessica Campbell, Porn Cabbie, 2018, Acrylic rug and oil on panel
Claire Voon - What drew you to begin working with carpet material, and why did you decide to weave carpet onto canvas while incorporating paint?
Jessica Campbell - I initially started using carpet on the floor. I had been using a brick wall pattern in my work for a while — first, as a representation of the brick wall of a comedy club, and ultimately as a metaphor for comedy. In 2014, when I was invited to be a part of a group show at the feminist artist-run-center Woman Made, I decided that I wanted to think about comedy in relation to my experience with gender. I realized that central in my understanding of my own gender was adolescence — a time during which society's relationship to my body was upended. Despite feeling like I was the same person I had always been, I was suddenly treated very differently; this was a difficult and frustrating transition, largely because it felt so deeply outside of my control. Comedy/humor acted an antidote or at least a counterpoint to this feeling of disenfranchisement, and I found that I could redistribute power, at least slightly or temporarily, by making jokes.
For that exhibition, I made a revisionist re-creation of my teenage bedroom, central in which was a brick-patterned carpet. I imagined this as a space for "lie-down comedy”: a phenomenon where you use comedy or humor as a coping mechanism for a lack of agency, or the kind of depression that renders you unable to do anything but lie prostrate on the floor.
The carpet "paintings" developed out of this earlier work. I liked how putting them on the wall complicated the relationship between the horizontal/vertical and Rosalind Krauss's idea of those as gendered states. As someone whose first art encounters as a child were with kitsch like latch-hooked rugs, the connection that medium was also significant for me, though my works are not hooked but collaged. Having some paint peek through from time-to-time obscures their material a bit, which I appreciate in art.
Installation image, Who Dis, Western Exhibitions, 2018
I am curious about your choice of imagery, which features disparate scenes and often seemingly comical human subjects. Are your images sourced from photographs, drawn from memory, or do they represent pure fiction? The screen is also a recurring image in this image; can you please explain this attraction?
The specific imagery in this exhibition comes primarily from my personal experiences or stories I have been told, though some deal more with a general cultural phenomenon. Otherwise, I use quick drawings as my reference material, which I then transfer on to the panel surface before collaging.
The screen is a dominant force in our culture! I take the city bus nearly every day, and the majority of its riders are on their phones for the whole ride (myself included). This has made an important impact on me, especially because there has been such an enormous shift in our relationship to technology during my lifetime. The screen is a wild thing. Somehow our phones feel very private and personal, which can be a dangerous thing in light of recent privacy violations, border and immigration issues. I think it also leads to laughably upsetting situations like a cab driver watching porn as he drives (something that a friend experienced), or my own experiences of having men pull out their phones and take photographs of me without my consent. Lastly, we now tend to have our primary experiences with art happen through the screen, be that through tools like Instagram or, more alarmingly, the phenomenon of people exclusively looking at work in galleries/museums through their phone screens as they take pictures. Why go see a painting in a museum if you're only going to take a phone photograph of it?
CV - How has your work as a comic artist influenced your style as a painter? And when you create carpet paintings, what new challenges or opportunities does storytelling through one canvas, rather than multiple panels, introduce?
JC - I am interested in how we read paintings and comics differently, and the relationship between the history of narrative painting and comic books. Comics are meant to be read, so the images have a glyph-like design quality so that they can be understood quickly. Their meaning is constructed through their sequence, and they are often meant to be very specific, not open to interpretation. Paintings function quite differently: we're meant to ruminate on a single image for a long time, drawing our own associations, thinking about the material, its historical context, the painter, the imagery or lack thereof, etc. Narrative painting is perhaps somewhere in the middle, in particular religious painting from before most of the population was literate. Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel, for instance, is an example of painting where the viewer is supposed to get a specific interpretation of the work, where the pictures act as "memory images" evoking the life of Christ. To me, this is similar to the Canadian cartoonist Seth's interpretation of comics as memory images, though clearly there are significant material differences and quite a substantial divide in how the work circulates.
Jessica Campbell, Watching 'My 600-lb Life' at the Gym, 2018, Acrylic rug and oil on panel
Characters, rather than simply figures, are central to your practice, whether you’re working in comics, performance art, or carpet painting. What types of characters do you find yourself drawn to?
I love people who are abject, pathetic, comically tragic. I lived in Montreal for several years before moving to Chicago, and was deeply interested in a lot of the characters who live there. For instance, "circus" is really popular there, so you'll see, like, a guy riding a unicycle in a tricorn hat playing a flute or something. Dan Clowes coined this term "urban attention-seeker," which basically describes most of Quebecois culture. There is something slightly tragic or pathetic about it, but it's also amazing to see people who are so resolute in their likes and unconcerned with how that relates to the rest of humankind or whether or not it's "cool."
I think I need some kind of story in my work in order to be fully engaged. I remember taking an abstract painting class when I was in undergrad (with the great Quebecois artist Francoise Sullivan!) where the year-long assignment was to make paintings that had no focal point and were totally abstract, and I found it nearly impossible to do. I was desperately looking around the room painting ceiling fans or whatever I could see and then obscuring them so I wouldn't get scolded by the professor. Thus ended my attempt to be a serious abstract painter.
Installation image, Who Dis, Western Exhibitions, 2018
How else has living in Canada influenced your practice? And having moved to Chicago, has this geographic shift also impacted your work?
My initial and primary encounters with art, history, politics, etc., all begin in Canada. A lot of my work has specifically Canadian references: XTC69 is set in British Columbia (at least until the characters leave for space); Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists has a specifically Canadian section that I realize is alienating to American readers; and my MCA show is using the work of the complicated Canadian painter Emily Carr as a starting-off point.
Moving to Chicago has influenced my work, but it is difficult for me to disentangle how much of that has to do with the geography of the place and how much as to do with my friends, grad school peers, mentors, the jobs I've had here, my access to world class museums like the Art Institute and MCA. One thing that has become very clear to me through living in different countries, attending a few different universities, teaching, working in an art gallery and just having artist friends is that there are multiple different art worlds. It's often easy to exist within your sphere and not realize that there are other people (even within your own city!) who are making/exhibiting/interpreting art in very different ways. That has been illuminating.
Lastly, I LOVE Canada forever and ever (with some obvious reservations about its history of colonialism, racist immigration policies, etc), but the Canadian art scene can be somewhat conservative. I appreciate that in Chicago, I can call a bunch of bathmats collaged on to a board and everyone is fine with it. That would be seen as more controversial in Canada, ha.
Is there a medium — or blend of media — you are curious to explore next?
I've been working on ink drawings that are covered in charcoal so they are only barely readable, if at all. I have some sculptural objects that I have not shown but am hoping to continue working with. And I want to get back into regular oil painting! I haven't really made a proper oil painting since graduating from my MFA in 2014, but it was my first medium and one I truly love, so I'd like to get back to it once the trauma of grad school has fully washed off, haha.
Jessica Campbell, Porn Cabbie, 2018, Acrylic rug and oil on panel
JESSICA CAMPBELL is a Canadian artist and humourist based in Chicago, working in comics, fibres, painting, drawing and performance. Her book Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists was published by Koyama Press in 2016. She’s had solo and two-person in Chicago at Roots & Culture and Sub-Mission and at La Galerie Laroche/Joncas in Montreal; and has been included in group shows throughout the Midwest and Quebec, including moniquemeloche in Chicago. Her new graphic novel, XTC69, is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be released in May 2018.
jessicacampbell.biz
CLAIRE VOON is a writer based in Chicago focused on the arts and visual culture.
clairevoon.com
Jessica Campbell
who dis
April 13, 2018 - May 26, 2018
Western Exhibitions
1709 W Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60622 USA
312.480.8390
scott@westernexhibitions.com
All photos courtesy of Western Exhibitions, Chicago
Photographer: James Prinz
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