Project Description
Engaged with the military, football, power, religion, propaganda, and government, Shawn Campbell’s work forges unexpected relations between these cultural phenomena and investigates the idea of spectacle within civil, financial, and political power. Across diverse mediums including photography, sculpture, video installation and painting, Campbell’s work borrows from the aesthetics of minimalism, baroque, pop art, and byzantine while using readily available building materials such as plywood, commercial advertising, obsolete objects such as monitors and slide projectors In this way, key systems appear, granting pieces within the overall body of work the ability to collaborate with one another through aesthetics and language - working in a broad and open manner, presenting questions and granting the viewer the opportunity to connect within the work openly. The concept of power is laced throughout the work. Campbell utilizes physical and psychological play in order to point out how violence has become a central and pervasive phenomenon within contemporary American culture.
