opening reception: Thursday, March 21, 6-8pm

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There was a time when I collected the five-day forecast from a daily newspaper. I did this off and on for about six months. I wanted to collect something that lost its value very quickly. Monday’s Tuesday turning into Tuesday’s Wednesday. I laminated each forecast and taped them together into a long strip and coiled the strip and placed it in a film canister labeled “Anthony Campuzano, Forecast, 1998.” Recently a film was produced from the strip.
 
Paul, Doris, Chandi, Jim, Charo, and Imelda all met long ago in Hawaii for dinner and conversation.
 
I once made a black-and-white handbill that was a self-portrait and handed it out at City Hall in Philadelphia. There is a new version that is not afraid of red, yellow, or blue.
 
There is a cabinet filled with treasures both solitary and shared. It is a domestic cabinet.
 
I made a series of drawings based on a photograph of a sign in an empty storefront window. The sign read, “Everybody Matters.” I still can’t decide what the sign was for, does the body refer to physical health? Was the storefront some kind of exercise place? The odd tilt of the D in body didn’t make sense at first but later I wondered if the D is tilted to show individuality. Whatever the origin I have had this photo taped up many times and in many places and I love the hand on the corner and the way the word “matters” starts to fall out of place. The three versions I made all go together, they should read like a sign being in one place overnight and into the day. I also do believe Everybody Matters.
Truman Capote once published a travelogue titled Local Color.
 
There is a small word balloon in a Joseph Cornell collage that reads, “Even before we met I knew you were out there somewhere . . .” There is more to tell but I feel the cold water of a note long ago put in my pocket by a former girlfriend that read, “I want to get out of here. You are telling everyone your business.”
– Anthony Campuzano, Philadelphia, 2013

Churner and Churner is pleased to announce “Local Color,” an exhibition by Anthony Campuzano of ten new drawings and the artist’s first film. It is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition takes its title from Truman Capote’s Local Color, an early collection of travel essays written in the 1950s and first published in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. According to Capote, these “small truthful impressions” were a precursor to his nonfiction novels like In Cold Blood. They were literary snapshots culled from chatter, headlines, and first-hand experience. Campuzano similarly recodes personal experience, celebrity gossip, and found imagery. In Paul, Doris, Chandi, Jim, Charo, and Imelda (2013), for example, he tells the story of Peewee Herman’s mock wedding to Doris Duke’s adopted daughter through a maze of hand-drawn text.

In each of the works for this exhibition, Campuzano considers questions of doubling and distance, not only by repeating the act of drawing the same image – as in Domestic Cabinet 1 and Domestic Cabinet 2, as well as the triptych Everybody Matters – but also by remaking several key works from his past. He reaches back to some of his earliest projects, including a 1998 “film” made of taped extracts of daily forecasts. Each clipped weather icon, front and back, was shot on 16mm film; the result, Forecast 1998/2013, is a three-minute homage to a past never meant to be saved.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Anthony Campuzano’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia; and White Columns, New York. His recent group exhibitions include “The White Album” (2013), Louis B. James, New York; “HiJack!” (2012), Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; “Off Camera” (2011), Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia; “Drawn to Disaster” (2011), ICA at MECA, Portland, Maine; and “Drawing in the World” (2009), Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Campuzano received his BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2000. He was a 2009 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a resident at Ucross in 2011. He recently published Stars: Even the Sun with All Its Warmth Is Detached (Portland: Publication Studio, 2013).