Programming

Plug and Play is a proposal about the landscape and the various ways it is perceived in our society. The intention of this work is to act as a dialogue between the natural environment and our way of understanding that entity. In this vein, Campbell takes the viewer on a forest walk by giving them the perspective of God, that is to say, by offering them the overhanging gaze of surveillance on images of the forest captured in the manner of an aerial photograph.

The artist thus highlights various tools used by man to define, measure and understand natural areas: cartography, sectioning, art history, popular culture. Plug and Play stages "anthropomorphic fragments of the forest" to show certain aspects and/or obscure events of our culture. The landscape becomes the witness, says the artist, of curious behaviors such as humming country and western tunes at the wheel of a car, noticing the reflections of a setting sun on a broadcasting tower, picking up rumors of UFOs by radio.

Geographic isolation, empty landscape, and wide-open spaces are enduring characteristics of the North American image of nature, a nature for which the isolated road through endless stretches of tree-lined land has become synonymous in the culture here. In Plug and Play, Michael Drew Campbell evokes these clichés that tattoo the perception of North American nature, but also underlines the progressive disappearance of these romantic notions whose survival can only be precarious in the age of satellites capable of reading a car's license plate remotely...

Michael Drew Campbell lives and works in Montreal. He is a graduate of Concordia University's painting and drawing program. Since 1989, his work has been exhibited regularly, notably in Toronto and Montreal.