Neil Campbell’s Wheatfield

Artist plays with perception by shifting relationships between figure and ground.

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Neil Campbell’s exhibition is like standing in the titular wheat field and witnessing the unending prairie horizon: you need to experience it in person. On view at the Esker Foundation in Calgary until May 12, the show is a disorienting encounter with the combined effects of colour, scale and form.

Campbell says his works are not manifestations of ideas but exist to encourage visual exploration. He presents 10 pieces at the Esker, six large abstracts painted or applied to the wall and four cut from steel. It is primarily the scale and shifting figure-ground relationships of the large painted works that can only be appreciated firsthand.

Campbell, who was born in Saskatchewan and is now based in Vancouver, begins by responding to a space’s architecture. His success is most apparent in works like Axel and On a Bridge in London, in which the geometry of the paintings interacts with corners and the edges of the walls in unexpected ways.

As visitors enter, they face three coloured rectangles folding into a chair-like shape. This piece, Axel, consumes the visual field. Two corners precariously touch the wall’s base and top, as if preventing the painting from toppling over.

The connection between architectural and pictorial space is further confused by the central navy rectangle, which seems to project out of the picture plane. However, the gallery’s physical space recedes into a corner, creating an amusingly frustrating viewing experience.

The exhibition also contains four works made from hot-rolled steel and hung on the wall. The smaller, canvas-sized Dog 3 (Steel) is a square from which four circles have been cut.

Campbell challenges our instinct to see the circles as the positive figure when a perceptual shift reveals a shape more like a four-cornered puzzle piece. He also employs elements of Gestalt psychology (perceiving completed circles where no circles really exist) as reminders of how suggestible perception can be.

Over all, the show reminds me of Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting, The Ambassadors. This seemingly innocuous portrait of two men contains a stretched and tilted shape at their feet. Only by moving around the painting – and acknowledging the malleability of vision – does a skull reveal itself. Similarly, Campbell’s exhibition is a reminder that seeing and knowing are easily manipulated corporeal experiences. ■

Wheatfield is on view at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 26 to May 12, 2019.

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