A Salt Lake City-born, Los Angeles-based artist whose works include paintings and multimedia sculpture installations that investigate her own family history – revealing the changing nature of relationships over time and space through a reimagining of found images that have been exhibited across the United States, from California to New York, Vermont and Florida, to Ohio, Utah, Colorado and Oregon, and internationally in Madrid and Basel – plumbs her own psychological depths to discover what makes her love work and life.
What historical art figure would you like to have lunch with and why? Paula Modersohn-Becker. Her work is genius and her life fascinating.
What did you purchase with the proceeds from your first sale? Studio rent.
What words or phrases do you overuse? Dude.
How do you know when a work is finished? It lets go of me.
When and where were you happiest? The Alta Lodge 1989.
What is your most treasured possession? My father’s handmade wooden slingshot.
Where is your ideal escape destination? Lake Quinault, WA.
What’s the worst survival job you’ve ever had? Cashier and dishwasher at Golden Burger.
What TV series from your youth best describes your approach to life? MASH.
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? The inevitability of death.
What is your most treasured memory? Holding my daughter before she died.
What makes you smile? My husband’s blue jokes.
What makes you cry? What doesn’t make me cry.
What is your go-to drink when you toast to a sale? Lagavulin neat.
After an all-nighter, what’s your breakfast of champions? Biscuits and gravy.
Who inspires you? I have yet to meet anyone whose life story has not inspired me in some way.
What’s your best quality? My intensity.
What’s your biggest flaw? My intensity.
What is your current state of mind? Hopeful, overwhelmed, eager, exhausted, determined, curious, and playful.
What do you consider your greatest achievement? Escaping a life of servitude prescribed to women by the community I was born into.
If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what would it be? I would wish not to die and to just keep on mucking around in the person I am.
Rebecca Campbell’s exhibition Infinite Density, Infinite Light is on view at LA Louver through July 2; cover photo Artbound: Artist and Mother, KCET Television; installation images courtesy L.A. Louver
For more information, visit the artist’s website.
