Question of 'Seeing' - one self

In Three Transitions, Campus presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. He begins with an image created by two cameras facing opposite sides of a paper wall and filming simultaneously. His back to one camera, Campus cuts through the paper. In the double image, it appears as if he is cutting through his back, which is both disconcerting and tongue–in–cheek. Campus then uses the "chroma–key effect" of superimposing one video image onto a similarly colored area of another image. He applies blue paint to his face, and during this process another image of himself is revealed; he then superimposes his image on a piece of blue paper, which he sets afire. AsThree Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self–destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality.

Faces and masks have long been subjects in art, but, with the advent of television, these analytical discursive figures intimately entered our daily lives. Campus's video art is concerned with exploring the subtle balance between remote but penetrating and formal, but unsettling, elements.

The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999

Peter Campus, born in New York in 1937, is one of the seminal figures in the development of video art. Along with Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Frank Gillette and Dan Graham, he was among the pioneering artists who explored how video imagery could challenge the traditional relationships between artist, subject and viewer. In the artist’s 1970s closed-circuit video installations, viewers experienced their own images in real time manipulated to produce unique, and sometimes unsettling, psychological effects. Informed by his life-long interests in the neurophysiology of cognition, and cinema, these early works explored the formal sculptural qualities of projected video space. In more recent digital video work, Campus’ formal exploration is framed within his environmental concerns.