Ashley Campbell

My work functions as a type of pastiche—an interdisciplinary collage of sound performance, video, ceramics, sculpture, and photography. By utilizing theatricality, artifice, and fragmentation, I am able to create spaces that feel familiar yet warped, as if existing in a dream or alternate reality. I am inspired by set design, props and window displays and am very invested in color, texture, pattern and spacial relationships. I use a lot of found materials that I re-work and they tend to be items from the home.

Lately the word liminal has been on my mind. Merriam-webster defines liminal as 1: of, relating to, or situated at a sensory threshold : barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response. 2: of, relating to, or being an intermediate state, phase, or condition

Liminal is also a term used in Anthropology to describe a state of disorientation that happens during a ritual or right of passage, when a person is standing at the threshold of transformation. It is also a term often applied to our digital lives and the spaces we occupy on the internet.

I have utilized a green screen character as a way to approach the digital liminal. Thinking of alternate reality or parallel universe as a lived experience in which we exist in multiple universes every day. There is our physical body, and physical space we occupy, then we extend our identity into a digital form, predominately through a curation of photos. These curated personas then extend into abstract floating data that is collected and exists within a multitude of computer algorithms programed to collect information.Borrowing from magical realism, where a very extraordinary thing occurs but is accepted as reality, I place the character in mundane settings and key out the suit, placing other visual imagery within it. Even though I add information within the green screen body it cannot escape the feeling of flatness. The character is an image, two dimensional with the illusion of depth, a void, a boundary in the shape of a body.

I am oscillating between the physical prime and digital prime. Both feeling very important. I am navigating the challenges of bringing those things together cohesively, as one world. How do I portray the liminal in physical space? Is liminal the thing that connects all of the work together? Doorways and portals are considered liminal. Formally the work all points to each other. Circles, loops, hair, limbs, decor, adornment, bodily. It is a moment of un-captured desire. Hands beckoning and reaching. Use and misuse. Perhaps the work is best approached as something which cannot be made to add up.