Lights on Market Street Installation: Urban Reflection by Jim Campbell

Artist Jim Campbell shares some words about his Lights on Market Street installation Urban Reflection, which is located at 1119 Market Street at Seventh Street.

A lot of my works in some form or another are mirrors that reflect back a modified or distorted reflection. The imagery for this work is shot from the same location that the work is being presented, but because the image is presented in low-resolution, the details of the people and the cars etc. are not there.  In other words, there is enough information in the image to know right away that the imagery is Market Street (both the location and the people), but the specifics are not there.

How has it been to work on a site-specific installation in Central Market?

It’s great as it will be such a non-art world audience who sees this work. So much of my work ends up in a clean white box gallery or a sterile airport, and needless to say, Central Market is very different. So how the pedestrians on Central Market respond to the work will determine whether or not it is successful.

About the artist:

Jim Campbell was born in Chicago in 1956 and lives in San Francisco. He received two Bachelor of Science Degrees in Mathematics and Engineering from MIT in 1978. His work has been shown internationally and throughout North America in institutions such as the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University; the International Center for Photography, New York; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Intercommunication Center in Tokyo. His electronic artwork is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, and the University Art Museum at Berkeley. In 1992, he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the United States in Phoenix, Arizona, and is currently working on large scale permanent public artworks at the San Diego Airport, and a collaborative work with Werner Klotz for the new San Francisco Central Subway, Union Square Market Street Station. He has lectured on interactive media art at many institutions throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  He has received many grants and awards including a Rockefeller Grant in Multimedia, three Langlois Foundation Grants, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.