DPAG Rear Window

In February, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery installed Joyce Campbell’s Company Stream (2017) in the Rear Window Gallery. As noted in the accompanying label: At first indistinguishable, the camera tracks close-up movement of an eel in cloudy water. A sense of poetry emerges through the knowledge of Campbell’s parallel reading of Julio Cortazar’s From the Observatory (1972) – a prose poem, using stars and eels as metaphors for the worlds above and below, that considers the limitations of science to measure realms beyond the rational mind.

Company Stream is part of a programme curated by the Gallery’s 2020 curatorial intern Joanna Osborne and is the first of five moving image works to be exhibited throughout 2021/22. This programme also includes works by Stella Brennan, Michael Nicholson, Jae Hoon Lee and Denise Batchelor.

Campbell’s Company Stream will be on display at the Gallery until 26 April 2021.

Noho ora mai, Lauren Gutsell
Curator, Dunedin Public Art Gallery

[above: JOYCE CAMPBELL Company Stream 2017. Digital video (still). Courtesy of the artist]