'Field Work' Considers New Ways of Perceiving Your Immediate Environment

For more than five years, visual artist Susan Goethel Campbell has been working out of studio space tucked inconspicuously along Livernois, near Marshall. And though she said, "Ferndale's still sorting itself out" when it comes to a concrete artistic identity, she added, “I like being in this community of artists. I like knowing that there are other studios here and galleries here."

Goethel Campbell then lists off the likes of the Butcher's Daughter, the and the , where her forthcoming show Field Work opens Saturday. This is her fourth solo show at the Lemberg Gallery.

Goethel Campbell said her latest show is driven by ideas about landscape and attempts to shift our perception of the physical world. Since being awarded the 2009 Kresge Art Fellowship, she has documented common occurrences in her immediate environment. Her work has explored things as vast and intangible as the natural world, to something as ostensibly palpable as drawings or books.

The diligent research devoted to her works, which required the study of weather patterns, air pollution, and even herbology, has made her “kind of like a naturalist,” she said. Thus, the pieces in Field Work blur the line between man-made events and natural events, natural systems and technological system “and everything in between."

"I’m interested in flipping something that’s organic and making it look more technological and taking something technological and making it look organic," she said.

Goethel Campbell received a Masters in Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield in 1989 and taught fine arts for 15 years at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Before settling into her Livernois space, she had a studio in her Huntington Woods home and then, for time, she worked inside space at Nine Mile and Woodward, next door to what is currently home to the Butcher’s Daughter.

“If you dig really deep into the work, the driving force is concern for the physical world,” Goethel Campbell said. “It’s not important that the viewer know that instantly, because then it becomes a turn-off. But if I can catch people aesthetically, to where they really want to go: ‘Hmm, is there anymore behind this?’ My work is a way for me to look at things that maybe aren’t so pleasant.”

Through her work, she has provocatively blurred perceptions of air pollution, arboreal detritus and infestations of insects. But her grace is subtly; her work doesn’t hit you over the head, it more so reflects on our own perceptions.

“It comes down to concern for the environment," she said, "but I’m philosophically interested in beauty.”

Field Work opens March 12, with an opening reception from 5-8 p.m., and runs through April 30. Goethel Campbell will give a gallery talk on April 23 at 2 p.m.

For more works by Susan Goethel Campbell click here; to see her projects spurred by the Kresge Arts Fellowship, click here.