Anna Campbell
Green Room for a Dream Sequence

RUSCHWOMAN
2100 S. Marshall Blvd., Suite 105
Chicago, IL 60623

January 28 – March 24, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, January 28, 3–6PM

CAA Conference Event: To coincide with the 112th Annual CAA Conference, taking place in Chicago, RUSCHWOMAN will host a Happy Hour event on Friday, February 16th, from 5-7PM

Outside the opening and CAA event, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements
to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.

Once more and more when it was once more and once more when more when it was. When one goes three go and when three go two go. She said she did not believe in there having there having been there having been there having been there before. Refusing to turn away. [1]

[Repetition] fragments identity itself…every time we encounter a variant, a difference, a disguise or a displacement, we will say that it is a matter of repetition, but only in a derivative and ‘analogical’ sense. [2]

[T]hat which is decorative appears to be also structural and structuring; and the feminized and the feral are no so much repressed as spectacularly invoked…The problem, as we begin to suspect, is that the façade may not have banished…those ‘feminine and sensuous residues’ so much as reproduced them, nor has interiority been fully restrained from enacting surface activity. [3]

What’s said on stage has been said before. And between its repeated utterances, stuttering syllabic do-si-do yearning to be if not the last then at least the most, the waiting-to-perform-again is kept, as it were, on arsenic ice, lounging, pouting. This would-be selected phrasing is only one constitutive feature of the oh so crucial interpellating speech act—the other is the body. (Did Irigaray consider those flapping vocal cords, their oscillation, their respective ‘box,’ in her ‘more than one’ postulations? A sort of ‘more than one’ squared of voice box and, well, box box with their flaps and folds issuing forth passion and performativity inextricable in their flows?) At this attenuated level of cathexis, knowing one’s lines most of all demands the knowledge that there are no straight lines nor identical ones, but rather queer lines contouring bodies, words, props, staging, and audience, all sulking toward uneasy resemblance.

This is the circumnavigated psychosexual drama acted out in a sequence of interrelated installations by Anna Campbell across the better part of the last decade. Campbell’s sharp-witted re-constructions of de-constructions of construction sites—surrealist blends of architectural engineering, bespoke haberdashery, and coy public/private disclosures of the connoisseur’s fetishes—ask after the conditions that give form to material production, particularly those modalities that eschew biological reproduction as a precursor. Signaling toward the already pretenses of a society of norms and abnormalities, cultures, subcultures, and countercultures, Campbell cites theatre, its phases, conventions, superstitions, and structures in service to an expanded field of research around the compulsive performances of gender and sex, certainly, but perhaps also those of pleasure, desire, and a broadly applied notion of orientation toward materiality.

RUSCHWOMAN is ecstatic to present Anna Campbell’s Green Room for a Dream Sequence, the more recent extension of these inquiries here intoned with anticipation and dread: a mise en abyme waiting room that behaves in a similar manner of interruption as the fragmentation of sleep and dreams that punctuates one’s navigation of the real. Campbell has arrayed an interplay between strategic mimeses and poetic missives that stand precisely on the very verge of an ominous election year, precariously deathly ecosystems, and a burning landscape of embittered culture wars wherein the livability of queer people, trans people, drag performers, women, and autonomy over their own bodies is forestalled by a crisis of definition where the sheer facts of their existence are threatened by being rendered unthinkable in the public consciousness.

Under these conditions, a take it from the top, do it again, committed rehearsal may be synonymous with anxiety per se, dulling and incisive at different passes. What from some facets of Campbell’s sculptures appears as solid, hard, and weighty, with obstinate insistence on holding space, can also seem to refer to a latent and self consciously ironic hysteria—a seriously camp constellation of provisions, delicate monuments to worst case scenarios, and the always destabilizing effects of a copy, even a backup copy.

In Green Room for a Dream Sequence, Campbell provides a POV interlocutor from which to survey various twinnings, reflections, and double quotations: Prince Adam, the hapless, pink-and-lavender coded alter ego of He-Man in the cartoon Masters of the Universe franchise originating in 1983. Prince Adam (subtly scrambled by Campbell into Prince Madame) is to He-Man what Rrose Sélavy was to Marcel Duchamp, or the gentler phases of masc-femme variables in Woolf’s Orlando. He-Man when he’s not manning up to be a ‘barbarian’ IP devised to compete with the Star Wars toy market, in his off hours, Prince Adam is, well, a little off, a casually poof-fairy dandy version of the character made all the more deliciously perverse in the imagery Campbell has gathered into video, extracted from online resale listings of used Prince Adam action figures. This lilac and muscle clad paradox sits at the heart of the Green Room amongst the suave kink of latex rubber, metal, vice grip, macho-sissy dolls, and Campbell’s other polymorphous perversities.

At some point in the firestorm, a Lerner and Loewe, Jacques Demy, or Sondheim beckons for song. Far from contradictory, the formal distinctions of revelry and struggle are the basis upon which Pride, not to mention the solidarities expressed through nightlife whenever crises have befallen queer communities (AIDS, Pulse….) function as coextensive compulsions toward ecstasy and melancholy. These are, in fact, the draped more than one curtains slapping together in defiant excess. As Campbell arranges it, the stage is far more than a temporary respite from the world that stares it down; it is a threshold for world building alterity, a pervasively effete simultaneity of abandon and loss that, more or less, look and sound the same.

[1] Gertrude Stein. “An Acquaintance with Description.” Writings 1903–1932. New York: The Library of America, 1998. Print, p. 530.

[2] Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2001. Print, p. 271.

[3] Anne Anlin Cheng. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Print, p. 29.

ARTIST BIO

Anna Campbell’s sculptures, installations, and ephemera mine history and queer desire.

Green Room for A Dream Sequence is the fourth chapter in a series of solo shows that foreground queer infrastructures of support. The third chapter, Dress Rehearsal for a Dream Sequence, was on view at Participant, Inc in New York in 2022. The exhibit was featured in a Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment talk with Ksenia Soboleva and reviewed in the New Art Examiner. Campbell’s exhibition record also includes solo exhibits at BOSI Contemporary in New York, Tractionarts in LA, and the Window Into Houston at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, as well as group exhibits at Seoul National University of Science and Technology in South Korea, AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, Gallery 400 in Chicago, and the Green Gallery at Yale.

Campbell’s work has been featured in Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Collection (Hirmer, 2019) as well as in the Advocate.com, Hyperallergic, GQ.com, the Chicago Reader, and in “Hip openers: on the visuals of gendering athleticism” by Erica Rand, published in Queer Difficulties in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim & Christopher Reed (Routledge, 2017.) They have been in residence at FIAR (Fire Island Artist Residency), ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), Ox-Bow, the Vermont Studio Center, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Campbell’s work is in the collections of numerous universities as well as the Leslie Lohman Museum, the MoMA Library, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her site-specific, bronze sculpture is permanently installed at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn.

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