Catalyst: Rebecca Campbell Painting Feminine Power

June 1 – December 17, 2022
Catalyst: Rebecca Campbell Painting Feminine Power is a survey of works from Rebecca Campbell’s prodigious output over the past fifteen years, focusing on the agency she gives the young and adult women in her paintings. For nearly two decades, Rebecca Campbell has created outsized paintings, often encompassing a viewer’s field of vision, that feature figures in dreamlike, allegorical settings in which gender politics, dogmas, and nuanced interpersonal, familial relationships are explored. Fusing abstraction and figuration, Campbell imbues her epic paintings with a vibrating luminosity which she then fills out with figures and settings composed of decisively applied broad strokes of washes and impasto. The exhibition resonates on national and international levels as the cultural and body-politic identities of women around the world are once again under undue surveillance and control.

Catalyst: Rebecca Campbell Painting Feminine Power is organized by the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College, and curated by The Doyle’s director and senior curator, Tyler Stallings. A version of the exhibition will travel to the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University, June 1 – December 17, 2022.

Rebecca Campbell was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1971. The youngest of seven children, Campbell was raised in a Mormon family. Her father, a prominent Mormon bishop, adhered to church doctrine and her mother encouraged the pursuit of a broad range of cultural activities.  Campbell received her BA degree from Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon in 1994 and her MA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. She now works and lives in Los Angeles.