REVOLVER (2011-2022)

16 mm Film transferred to Digital Video, Stereo Sound 

17'27" Minutes

Directed by Crystal Z Campbell

Download Director's CV

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Synopsis: An archive of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) narrated by a descendent of Exodusters.

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Director's BIO (long):

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but untold or unspoken. Using archival material, recent works consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks' “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Politics of witnessing and perception are explored through combinations of archival research, rumor, found footage, constructed imagery, and site history.

 

Campbell’s work frequently employs abstraction as a tool to complicate the intimacy and subjectivity of historical narratives. Campbell is currently working on two experimental feature-length films: the first around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and another, Post Masters, considering intersections between the United States Postal System (USPS) and US Military through the lens of both Filipinx and Black histories.

 

Campbell was a featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar in 2022, programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka. Honors and awards include a 2022 Creative Capital Award; 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts; Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellowship; Pollock-Krasner Award; MAP Fund; MacDowell; MAAA; Skowhegan; Rijksakademie; Whitney ISP; Franklin Furnace; UNDO Fellowship; Tulsa Artist Fellowship; Black Spatial Relics; amongst others.

 

Select exhibitions and screenings include the Walker Art Center (US), National Gallery of Art (US), Drawing Center (US), Nest (NL), ICA-Philadelphia (US), Museum of Modern Art (US), BLOCK Museum (US), REDCAT (US), Artissima (IT), Studio Museum of Harlem (US), Bemis (US), Project Row Houses (US), SculptureCenter (US), and San Francisco Museum of Art (US).

 

Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books (VSW Press), World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com, Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo who lives and works in New York & Oklahoma.

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Director's BIO (short):

Crystal Z Campbell (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Their archive-driven work in film/video, performance, installation, sound, painting, and text, has been screened and exhibited at 67th Flaherty Film Seminar, SculptureCenter, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Block Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and National Gallery of Art. Honors include the 2020 Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center Fellowship, 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2022 Creative Capital Award. Campbell is at work on their first feature film, and is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo who lives and works in New York & Oklahoma.

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Films Stills  Courtesy of Crystal Z Campbell.