Precog Jamaica

BONNIE CAMPLIN
PRECOG JAMAICA - LA
August 27 - October 8, 2016
Opening reception Saturday, August 27, 2016 6-8pm

Michael Benevento is pleased to present Precog Jamaica - LA, a solo exhibition by British artist, Bonnie Camplin.

Bonnie Camplin’s work is that of a willfully subjective emergence, where theory is manifest in practice. Intrinsic to such an expanded, holarchic practice is a complete refusal to accept the given parameters of consensus reality. This refusal extends through anarchist deconditioning philosophies and into transcendental psychic spaces. Camplin presupposes that the ways our minds can function and connect are not limited to the web of constructed systems that work to establish the normative presumptive limits of human reality. She believes that the human mind is capable of much more than we are conditioned to accept, and that there has historically been an interest in keeping our minds from expanding.

For the artist’s third exhibition with Michael Benevento, Camplin will present a specifically designed body of black-and-white printed panels that utilize diagrammatical language to index psychic communication. The artist describes the exhibition as key pages in “a work of semiotic speculative science-fiction or instructions/information transmitted to myself from far-future Witches”. Like her description implies, the work offers a space that seems to oscillate between a work of fiction and the offering of an actual premonition, though not one with an insistent or pointed agenda. In this case the drama speculatively posits far-future Jamaica as a key time-space vector that might assist in the evasion of neuro-mechanical and cybernetic systems of control.

Visually reminiscent of enlarged text book graphics, but with coded fragments of pictographic material that are pulled from metaphysical or even mystical symbolic sources, the black-and-white diagrams are not decipherable in the way that educational graphics are designed to illustrate factual authority. Instead, the graphics allow for associative and instinctive connections. Rather than producing the panels as simple pictorial information, Camplin designed an installation of geometric shaped wood panels that float throughout the space. The panels are painted white and directly printed upon in black ink giving them a surface quality more rich and complex than if printed on paper or vinyl and mounted. The viewing experience within the clean black-and-white space feels like entering an illustration of an astral projection, perhaps from the mind of a theoretical physicist or a perhaps from the mind of a precognitive pycho-physician or perhaps from the mind of an artist.