Friday, August 10, 2018

Jim Campbell: Tilted Plane


There is a whole lot to be said for going with several people you like to see Jim Campell's installation Tilted Plane at SFMOMA before it closes in September. This is one of those artworks that's both somewhat hard to describe and also somewhat hard to convey fully in photography (and no photos are allowed while you're inside of it). Here's what the museum's website has to say about it:


"Renowned San Francisco–based artist Jim Campbell’s mesmerizing light installation Tilted Plane (2011) explores the threshold of perception. The immersive work features a suspended grid of hundreds of incandescent bulbs whose filaments have been replaced by custom LEDs. Each light represents a “pixel” of information from an ultra-low-resolution moving image of birds in flight. Visitors are invited to step inside the room-sized artwork to experience the angled image plane from different perspectives and see how the flickering patterns of light may be discerned as shadowy forms in motion."


I'd say that both gets at, and does not get at, the magic of standing within this dimly lit space while this angled field of lights, arranged in quincunx rows wide enough to walk between, gently twinkles all around you like soft stars.




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