Emily Campbell
Outliers
March 6 – 29, 2020
Emily Campbell’s Outliers presents an installation of smaller gouache paintings and colorful ceramic sculptures that depict imagined landscapes populated by groups of fictional figures, often female. Each work evokes an individual’s relationship, interactions, and experiences with their surrounding environment—whether scenes of ritual and hedonism or quiet moments where traditional hierarchies are suspended.
“An outlier is defined as a person who is detached from the main body of a system or is atypical within a particular group; I am intrigued by the ways in which remote, precarious, or claustrophobic environments can influence and shape an outlier’s thoughts and actions. In my work, I use landscape features to suggest the inner thoughts of figures. Through distortion of form, exaggeration of color, and spatial incongruities, the environments in my paintings often reveal hidden aspects of the inhabitants’ motives, thoughts, and desires—more so than the facial expressions or body gestures of the figures themselves.
Inspired by botanical illustrations, ancient mythologies, science fiction, and historical imagery, I juxtapose seemingly disparate bits of imagery to create immersive work about desires, memories, and psychological states. In the exhibition, sculptures will be visually linked to the painted images through color, form, or recurring characters. My sequencing of images and arrangement of sculptures will playfully invoke the visual language of comics to generate an open-ended, nonlinear narrative, immersing the viewer in a heterotopic world that blurs the line between fact and fiction.”
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Emily Campbell is a visual artist and educator working in Baltimore, MD. She holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in visual arts from Mercyhurst University. Previous solo and group exhibitions include those at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Baltimore, MD), Maryland Art Place (Baltimore, MD), St, Johns College (Annapolis, MD), Gallery CA (Baltimore, MD), Push Gallery (Asheville, NC), The Delaware Contemporary (Wilmington, DE), School 33 (Baltimore, MD), and Arlington Art Center (Arlington, VA). She has participated in residencies at Can Serrat (Barcelona, Spain), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (Nebraska City, NE), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild (Woodstock, NY). Campbell currently teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art and Anne Arundel Community College.
