brooklyn rail opinion piece on the campus | new york

Photo by Guang Xu. Courtesy The Campus, New York

Andrew Paul Woolbright wrote an opinion piece for Brooklyn Rail on the inaugural exhibition at the new Campus Space in uptown New York titled ‘Montage Curation and the Geography of Becoming.’ Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto took over a new shared space, The Campus, in Claverack, NY. Embracing a collaborative model, the galleries turned an abandoned former school building into a platform for dynamic cultural exchange, with the first exhibition curated by Timo Kappeller, running until October 27, 2024. 

Shinichi Sawada and four of his ceramic works feature, and he says of this: “I think of the way Tal R’s outdoor sculpture encroaches. Outside the window of a classroom, under the shade of a prairie elm, it is a dark imaginary, a trick of metaphysics that the teacher is unable to see. The students see it, and the psychologist treats it as real. It makes me think of how myth often enters after things come to an end, how magic opens up what has been closed off and inhabits what has been abandoned. What does it mean to include Shinichi Sawada’s totemic objects in the bookshelves of the library? Is it giving us the ability to feel animistic presence in a space designed to disinherit it? Or is it attempting a deeper replacement of knowledge with the atavistic impulses of the unknown? Tal R and Sawada in this context seem to unsettle primary education’s reliance on the Enlightenment, questioning how our earliest stages of development have become so codependent with positivism. Who and what made us all into empiricists?”