Artist statement
Crystal Z Campbell's creative practice centers the underloved and spans experimental film, painting, collage, sculpture, installation and text. Mimosa Pudica (Tampa) is part of a larger, ongoing series featuring the touch-sensitive mimosa pudicaplant. The plant is said to have been introduced by Spanish colonizers to the Philippines through the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade, which bridged South America and Asia from 1565-1815. Rampant across tropical locations, the mimosa pudica has earned many classifications from an abundant weed, to an anti-inflammatory medicinal aid, to a learned and sentient being that exists in the liminal space between plant and animal categorizations. Mimicking the archipelagic structure of the Philippines, their mother's homeland, each photographed specimen has been cut and arranged into numerous fragments to suggest a whole. Campbell’s haptic paint and collage interventions speak back to the notion of the still life genre, while the mimosa pudica acts as agent, transmitter, and witness disrupting colonial amnesia and offering another lens to examine the explicit and implicit residues of colonial touch.
Artist bio
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose archive-driven works center the psychogeographic, historical perception, and the underloved. Campbell’s films and visual art have screened and exhibited internationally: European Media Arts Festival, SFMOMA, Chicago International Film Festival (Silver Lion), National Gallery of Art, MIT List Center, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, MOMA, St. Louis Museum of Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, Artists Space, Bemis, Block Museum and others. Campbell has received honors from NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, Creative Capital, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP program. Campbell is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo who works between Oklahoma and New York.
