Saskatoon artist Tammi Campbell’s highly technical paintings hover between abstract and real, complete and incomplete. Employing Modernism as an investigative tool, Campbell recasts ordinary materials into new forms through innovative studio processes. Double Remove features works from the past five years that expand the perceptual and conceptual possibilities of paint.
Works in Progress (2014) is a series of acrylic paintings on paper inspired by tropes of hard-edge minimalism. These seemingly unfinished grey-scale studies, lined with trompe l’oeil masking tape, reveal the artist’s interest in materiality and process. Also on view are Monochromes (2016), radically reductive abstractions whose surfaces mimic packing tape, bubble wrap and corrugated cardboard. These meticulous works address their own making and, ultimately, raise questions about the role of painting today.
Tammi Campbell received a BFA from the University of Saskatchewan. She has exhibited her works at the Esker Foundation, Calgary; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto; Mercer Union, Toronto; and the Galerie de l’UQAM, Montréal. Her work is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Remai Modern, Saskatoon; the Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina; and the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina.
