Jim Campbell
THREE ARCS, 2022

LOCATION:

Raybon Plaza, Water Street Tampa

Details:

Corten steel, cast glass, silicone, custom electronics and RGB LEDs
Each arc is 92"W x 26"D x 100"H
Fourteen pods are also included in the installation; each pod is 20"W x 16"D x 5"H
Permanent installation in Raybon Plaza, 564 Channelside Drive, Tampa, FL
Commissioned by Strategic Property Partners, the City of Tampa, and the University of South Florida.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

Three Arcs is a site-specific installation comprising of three curved walls and fourteen individual pods, all embedded with customized LED panels encased within glass enclosures, that project diffused video imagery. Working in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm of Nelson Byrd Woltz, artist Jim Campbell sited the installation’s components to respond to Water Street Tampa’s Raybon Plaza design and plantings which echo Florida’s ecologies. Nestled within the native vegetation and curvilinear runnel water feature in the public plaza, Three Arcs emits ethereal patterns of light that slowly transform, blurring the lines between abstraction and representation to explore humanity’s ability to interpret visual information by probing the margins of recognition. Viewers may see trees swaying in gusts of wind or ocean waves cresting on shore in the glowing video imagery that the artist captured around the Tampa Bay region. Three Arcs can be programmed remotely to allow for the projected imagery to be updated and evolve to respond to the site’s conditions. Harnessing the dynamism of moving images as rhythmic illuminators that can be perceived as both peripheral and primal, similar to how we experience music, Three Arcs evokes an emotional and contemplative response while contributing to a meditative atmosphere that invites deeper engagement in Raybon Plaza's serene setting adjacent to the Thousand & One office building and the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, Taneja College of Pharmacy and Health Institute.

ABOUT JIM CAMPBELL:

San Francisco-based artist Jim Campbell (b. 1956, Chicago, IL) is known for his iconic LED lightworks that explore the boundaries of human perception and memory. Using technologies developed for information transfer and storage, his custom electronic sculptures and installations incorporate low-resolution, pixelated imagery to explore how the human mind perceives and recognizes the differences between abstraction and representation and the distinction between the analogue world and its digital counterpart. Campbell’s work has been exhibited globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Chronus Art Center, Shanghai; Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia; Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia. His work is in numerous museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum. His public artwork and evolving LED platform Day for Night (2018) is permanently installed on the top nine floors of the 61-story Salesforce tower in San Francisco. Campbell has been honored for his innovative use of computer technology as an art form with a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship Award in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship Award. Trained as an engineer, Campbell holds Bachelor of Sciences degrees in both Mathematics and Engineering from MIT and nearly twenty patents in the field of video image processing.  

PRESS: 

Tampa Bay Times feature on public art in Water Street Tampa
https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/2021/11/26/water-street-tampa-readies-major-light-art-installations/

Fox 13 interview with Jim Campbell
https://www.fox13news.com/news/public-art-goes-digital-in-tampas-new-water-street-development

 

Three Arcs made possible by Florida's Art in State Buildings Program