Chicago Works: Jessica Campbell

Exhibition December 18, 2018 − July 7, 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago presents an exhibition "Chicago Works: Jessica Campbell".

Frank, often funny work of the Chicago artist and cartoonist Jessica Campbell (born in 1985) criticizes the problems and absurdities of gender policy. At her first personal museum exhibition, she presents the life and work of Canadian twentieth-century artist Emily Carr (1871–1945) surrounded by completely new works. Inspired by common roots, Campbell approaches Carr’s work from different perspectives and from different angles: from paintings and drawings to comics and textiles. Her vivid retellings turn seemingly distant artistic stories into live texts.

The central exhibit is a spectacular wall painting inspired by the works of Giotto di Bondone, depicting stories from the life of Christ (Scrovegni Chapel).

Campbell's work, however, shows vivid, cartoon-like scenes that intertwine the shaping, and often difficult, stories from the lives of both Carr and Campbell. Although the artists grew up in Victoria, British Columbia, with a difference of almost a century, territorially they lived only fifteen minutes apart, and many of the events that Campbell remembers from her past occurred in the landscapes that Carr painted.

Other works explore the biography of Emily Carr from additional points of view. A large-scale re-creation of unpublished cartoons in ink and charcoal sheds light on the invisible personal life of a Canadian artist, full of family humiliation and turmoil.

Based on the materials of the official site Museum of Modern Art in Chicago.

Photos from the exhibition: Nathan Kay