A cursory glance at Peter Campus’s exhibition shows large, elegantly composed harbor and seaside images of sailboats, dredgers, cranes, fishing boats, and trawlers at dockside. Look longer and Campus’s surfaces come alive, showing varying degrees of visual activity. Some objects move slightly: a boat slowly making its way on the horizon, an automobile entering at a picture’s bottom and passing quickly out of sight, gulls flying by. The entire surface of each image is a pixelated field that enhances the picture’s representational illusion while, incongruously it would seem, also making an abstraction of animated, quasi-modular geometry. These pictures are, in fact, large, flat, 55-inch video monitors. The camera in each case has been stationary, recording whatever movement, usually limited, is in its view, hence the look of still photographs, greatly enhanced by digital effects transforming aquatic and atmospheric shimmer.
