Joyce Campbell
As it falls

Joyce Campbell and Two Rooms have curated an exhibition from a selection of artworks from Campbell’s major survey “On the Last Afternoon” at The Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington. The original Adam Gallery installation was monumental in scale with massive hand-printed photographs touching the ceiling and unfurling on the floor twelve meters below to create a physical connection between all three floors of the gallery spaces. In the resulting photographic montage latent and unexpressed connections between Joyce’s various bodies of work were articulated within a single network on a vast wall that could be viewed from multiple platforms within the gallery but never seen face-on in their entirety from any one position. 

Two Rooms has installed 6 of these colossal scrolls on one great dark wall to be viewed as a whole. The artist regards the physical complexity of this work and the near impossibility of viewing it together as analogous with our current ecological conundrum in general and her relationship with representation in particular. 

As it falls is a meditation on the materiality of photography and cinema. Joyce’s images of chemical and biological phenomena unfolding over time, speak to process, verticality, scale, minutia and massiveness. 

This exhibition is being shown in conjunction with the remaining works from the On the Last Afternoon at Te Uru, Waitakere from 19 September until 22 November 2020. The monograph, On the last Afternoon: Disrupted Ecologies and the Work of Joyce Campbell co-published by Sternberg Press and Adam Art Gallery, is now available at Two Rooms.