White Room: Anthony Campuzano

White Columns is pleased to present the first New York exhibition by the Philadelphia-based artist Anthony Campuzano. Working primarily with language, Campuzano’s works – often densely layered, elaborate drawings – explore the thresholds of history, politics, literature, and popular culture, with a view to – in the artist’s words: “slowing down the daily flow of information, and putting a magnifying glass on it.” Central to his White Room exhibition will be Campuzano’s most expansive work to date: Portrait of Mae Brussell, 2005, a twelve panel drawing that explores the entwined lives of Brussell – the celebrated anti-fascist, broadcaster and I. Magnin heiress – and Lee Harvey Oswald. (Brussell had attempted to track down Oswald’s every last utterance – in an attempt to present a more complete picture of the circumstances of both Oswald’s life/death and the Kennedy assassination.) The work, in its twelve parts, adopts a format inspired by Campuzano’s exposure to Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Like Robert Smithson’s 1966 drawing A Heap of Language, Campuzano’s works collapse and fragment conventional narratives, preferring instead less defined and more porous readings.