18th Street Art Center present "Nature (Interrupted)," an exhibition of works by artists Maura Bendett, Jeff Cain, Joyce Campbell, Christine Nguyen, Orlan, and Lothar Schmitz. The works of these six artists blur the distinctions between the natural and the manmade, the real and the imagined. Maura Bendett's wall sculptures of botanical growth gone awry hover anxiously between  fantasy and the anxiety of endless mutations. Jeff Cain's visceral sound environment, "Dead Air"," reords the collision of wind and fragments of radio chatter surrounding Mount Wilson. Taken during a recent trip to Antarctica, Joyce Campbell's haunting photographs of macabre ice formations surprise us with their mix of uncanny beauty and dread. Christine Nguyen blurs the boundary between the real and the fantastical in her manipulated photographs of an alternate natural world. Orlan's reliquaries containing body tissue from performative plasitic surgeries question the seperation of the artist's physical being from the art she creates. In his installation, Lothar Schmitz uses nature, science and technology to suggest that our ability to distinguish between the real and the manmade has resulted in a dysfunctional and unbalanced relationship to the natural world. The uncanny prevails in Nature interupted.

8 June-14 July 2007
Moving Still
An exhibition of works that shift in the ineffable space between stillness ad movement.
Contemporary New Zealand and Australian Photography from McNamara Gallery, commissioned by Rutherford Rede and presented by the Gus Fisher Gallery at the University of Auckland. Catalogue available with essay by Dr Jan Bryant, Art History, The University of Auckland.

Unlikely survivors in the mean city
Reviews of Joyce Campbell, Daniel Zeller, group show "Alone in the Jungle" and Josh Dorman.
By Leah Ollman, Special to The Times

The ambrotype, a photographic process invented in the 1850s, took its name from the Greek for "immortal" or "imperishable." An underdeveloped positive on coated glass, the ambrotype image assumed full visibility when backed by a dark surface. Cheaper to produce and easier to view than the daguerreotype, it supplanted the earlier method in popularity, especially for making portraits. Ambrotypes were widely made in the camps of Civil War soldiers and sent home as mementos.

"LA Botanical," Joyce Campbell's elegant, deeply thoughtful project at G727, shares something fundamental with those Civil War portraits, which long outlasted their subjects. Campbell's images are also made using the ambrotype process, and they directly engage with concepts of survival and living memory.

The 39 pictures in the artist's ongoing project represent plant species that grow in the city today, in spite of the myriad forces (development, climatic change, general disregard) that threaten their endurance.

Each species that Campbell shoots has a documented use: as food, poison or pleasure inducer, for medicinal or cosmetic purposes. The names of the plants and their functions are detailed in a small, graceful catalog accompanying the show; but in the gallery installation the images appear without any identification or verbal support. Humble icons, they stand for themselves with great dignity, a row of thin, clear glass plates propped, viewing room style, on a shelf that runs chest-high along the gallery walls. The shelf and the space directly behind it are painted black to maximize the pictures' legibility.

Campbell, originally from New Zealand and now living in L.A., shoots each specimen close-up, in isolation: sprigs of sage (anti-fungal and a stimulant to hair growth), sprays of pine (solvent and treatment for lice and tapeworm), stalks of barley (nutritious, cholesterol-lowering grain), stems of devil's weed (hallucinogenic, an antidote to nerve gas and cure for bed-wetting). Milky, silvery tones give way to shadowed areas that recede into darkness and lend the plants a sculptural presence.

The ambrotype process yields a high level of clarity, but Campbell invites blur in places, sacrificing detail for a stronger sense of the animate. This is taxonomy practiced with soul — not the clinical, formulaic sterility that has become such an affectation in photography post-Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Campbell's project is vast in scope but modest in execution, its subjects revealing themselves through characteristic forms and textures rather than the imposition of a severe aesthetic scheme. The pictures take from Karl Blossfeldt a respect for the brilliance of nature's design and from Anna Atkins a tone of serious botanical inquiry. Campbell belongs to the most thoughtful strain of contemporary photographers reviving obsolete methods — what historian and critic Lyle Rexer terms the "antiquarian avant-garde." Her adoption of the ambrotype process is not gratuitous but purposeful, conferring a simultaneous sense of past and present to images that, in fact, are meant to invoke both.

"LA Botanical," besides being a beautiful assembly of images, is the beginning of an archive. Archives are about preservation, and preservation implies loss — or at least its possibility. This archive is suffused with palpable nostalgia. The streaks and bubbles of collodion on the glass plates invoke a photographic era when the presence of the hand still mattered. The tender reverence Campbell demonstrates for these plants and their significance harks back to a near-mythic past when our connection to the earth was primary.

These are photographs of survivors. As instigators of awareness, perhaps they are tools of survival too.

G727, 727 S. Spring St., (213) 627-9563, through July 14. Closed Sundays through Wednesdays.
www.gallery727losangeles.com

LA Botanical
A project by Joyce Campbell

May 18th - July 14th, 2007
Reception: Friday May 18th 2007 7-10pm
Made possible through the generous assistance of the Durfee Foundation and Weldon Color Lab.

LA Botanical is an ongoing project, massive and perhaps unachievable in its full potential scope, to document each plant that grows in Los Angeles for which there is a documented use - be it food, medicine, weapon, abortive, analgesic, fuel, stimulant, building material, deadly toxin or mind altering entheogen. The plants are documented as wet-plate Ambrotypes, an anachronistic photographic form ubiquitous the 1850's-1890s, the period during in which Los Angeles grew from a dusty town of 1400 inhabitants to a major metropolitan center. The project is an attempt to reconcile Campbell's own rural background with her life here in Los Angeles, one of the most sprawling and unsustainable metropolises on earth.

LA Botanical operates simultaneously as map, inventory, and survival guide to the city of Los Angeles. It has the potential to reveal who lives here, from where they originate, what they value, how they eat, worship, heal, harm, travel, clothe themselves, seek insight or achieve oblivion. It also serves as a tool or guide - enabling its audience to see Los Angeles, not as a desiccated industrial wasteland into which resources must flow, but as a field of abundant life that might be harvested to satisfy our needs.

High Energy Constructs presents

TIME MACHINE
May 19 – June 16, 2007
Opening reception: Saturday, May 19, 6-9pm

Elonda Billera
Jessica Bronson
Joyce Campbell
Scott Cassidy
Greg Colson
Mike Cronin
Sean Duffy
Alexandre Lobanov
Dana Maiden
Monique Prieto
Antonio Adriano Puelo
Ian Svenonius

curated by Brad Eberhard

TIME MACHINE will be on view from May 19 – June 16, 2007. An opening reception for the artists will be held in the gallery on Saturday, May 19, 2007, from 6 – 9 pm, at 990 North Hill Street, Suite # 180, in Los Angeles' Chinatown. For more information regarding this exhibition, please call: 323.227.7920 or email: info@highenergyconstructs.com.

GALLERY HOURS: Friday and Saturday, 11 – 6, and by appointment.
www.highenergyconstructs.com