Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition Crystal Z Campbell: Makahiya from February 22 – June 1, 2024 at their architectural projection site on the north facade of the Everson Museum of Art.

This exhibition features new work by Campbell, commissioned by Light Work for exhibition at UVP. Campbell was in-residence at Light Work in June 2023 to create this work.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Crystal Z Campbell will present a special in-person event on Thursday, March 21 at 6:00 p.m. in the Everson Museum auditorium.

About the Work

Makahiya
2024

Makahiya is an original video by Crystal Z Campbell commissioned by Light Work for the UVP architectural projection. Campbell was in-residence at Light Work in June 2023.

Makahiya, a Tagalog word that translates to “shame” or “shyness”, is the latest short experimental film from Crystal Z Campbell. Rooted in botanical research on a plant that displays the unusual trait of thigmonasty, or touch-induced movement, Campbell’s film is structured like intertwined vines. Digital video filmed on a recent trip to their mother’s ancestral homeland in the Philippines mingles with hand drawn animations, manipulated photographs, and archival news coverage of the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo and its aftermath. Makahiya explores this seemingly sentient plant’s paradoxical identity, from rampant “invasive” weed to medicinal plant, reflecting on photosynthesis, memory, and the violent colonial impetus of regimented forgetting.

Makahiya is an excerpt from Campbell’s longer, forthcoming film project, Post Masters. This body of work is drawn from Campbell’s familial history––a Black military father formerly stationed in the Philippines and Filipinx mother hailing from the archipelago, who both retired from the US Post Office. Campbell explores both explicit and implicit traces of labor, landscape, love, and bodies as intimate agents, modes, and witnesses of empire ripe for decolonizing through the unraveling of sound, image, and cinematic time.

About the Artist

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Select honors include a Creative Capital award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MacDowell, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP. Campbell was a featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar and their works have been screened or exhibited at SFMOMA, Drawing Center, ICA-Philadelphia, Artists Space, MOMA, and Block Museum amongst other venues. Their short film, REVOLVER, received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and was featured in the Berlinale Expanded Film Forum. Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, and contributions to World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, Hyperallergic, and Beacon Press. Campbell’s work will have a solo exhibition at St. Louis Art Museum in Fall 2024 as the recipient of the Freund Fellowship. Campbell is currently Associate Professor of Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo who lives between Oklahoma and New York.

Artist’s website: crystalzcampbell.com

Sponsors

UVP’s 2023-24 programs are made possible with a Tier Three Project Support grant from the County of Onondaga, with the support of County Executive Ryan McMahon and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts.

Campbell’s project was made possible with the support of a New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant. All Light Work programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.