ica : current exhibition

TWILIGHT
Jim Campbell, Megan Greene, Kim Keever, Bennett Morris

January 21 - March 8, 2009

Eerie landscapes, omnipotent forces, images of death, and curious terrors are all common features in the Gothic Romantic tradition. One goal of this genre was to place man in meaningful context, which was often achieved by comparing the frailty of the human condition to the overwhelming and uncontrollable world. Attaining the sublime was an important ambition in Romanticism, often only achievable through horror or morbid excitement.

The artists in Twilight take on Romanticism from a 21st century vantage point. Using diverse media including painting, photography, installation, and video, these artists express issues of humanity, identity, and spirituality with an elegantly sinister touch.

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received 2 Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. His work has been shown internationally and throughout North
America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; The International Center for Photography, New York, and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic art work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona. He has lectured on interactive media art at many institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY. He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.

Megan Greene is a New York based artist whose delicately detailed drawings have a an unusually rich and dark presence. She is represented by Kinz, Tuillou, and Feigen in New Tyrk and has exhibited her work nationally including recent shows at Hallwalls, Byron Cohen Gallery, Scope Hamptons, Pulse NYC, Baumgartner Gallery, and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She was a 2007 nominee for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, and the recipient of a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to New Zealand Greene holds an MFA from Rutgers and a BFA from University of Notre Dame.

Kim Keever's large-scale photographs referencing the Romanticism of the Hudson River School "are imbued with a sense of the sublime, but also show a subversive side that deliberately acknowledges their contemporary contrivance and conceptual artifice". Kim Keever lives in New York City, and has exhibited extensively in galleries throughout the United States and abroad including Kinz, Tillou + Feigen in New York, Queens Museum of Art, Wooster Art Museum, Contemporary Museum of Art/ St. Louis. His work can be found in numerous collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Chrysler Museum, New England Museum for Contemporary Art, Nassau County

Bennett Morris creates photographs, sculptures and installations that explore the concept of ruins. His work draws on contemporary anxieties to bring together the sublime and the horrific. Morris has exhibited his work broadly throughout the northeast including recent exhibitions at Massachusetts College of Art, Whitney Artworks, the Code Conference, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Morris holds an MFA from Maine College of Art, a BFA from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, and was the recipient of a fellowship to study at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.