Jim Campbell, Memory/Recollection

I am writting about Jim Campbell's installation called "Memory/Recollection". 

http://www.jimcampbell.tv/portfolio/installations/memory_recollection/

I think his use of lo-fi materials (security cameras and grainy monitors) and still imagery of the physical space which the work is installed is quite interesting in that it utilizes many of the visual cues that you would find in cinema yet breaks them into disparate parts to make a narrative with no plot. 

As you enter the space the camera captures your image and you become a part of the fleeting narrative on the screens. By incorporating the viewers of the work into the work it breaks the traditional models of viewing a work, especially a video based piece. Simultaneously it also breaks the trickery of many surveillance style works such as the installation work of Bruce Naumann where the use of the camera is revealed only after you reach the screen at the end of the hall. Here all is laid out, front and center, an atypical placement for security style video equipment. 

The title of the work however make me rethink the materiality of the camera, screens and placement. Perhaps Jim wants the work to be more than a video piece, maybe it is a critique of art itself. Here the viewer is explicitly put into the work, and through the delay of the image, for a short time, they too become the work. Their image sits still, so it is not a purely video work, and the motion and movement of their image from left to right and then gone evokes the scientific studies of Muybridge's athletes and animals from the turn of the century.

Memory/Recollection is a complex piece and the way the piece works between the space of installation site, the viewers of the work, and the work itself is fascinating. It is as though the viewer is drawn to the piece as a moth is to a flame and in viewing it their image is consumed, replayed and destroyed.