PRESS RELEASE
Todd Camplin: Contain Me
May 16 – Jul 16, 2015
Holly Johnson Gallery is pleased to present, Contain Me: Ink Drawings by Todd Camplin. A reception will be held Saturday, May 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. Contain Me, the artist’s second solo show with the gallery, features fourteen new works and continues through July 18.
Todd Camplin has been abstracting text into detailed ink drawings for nearly a decade. Often taking months to complete individual works this painstaking process involves the repetition of small words, letters and marks evocative of highly detailed maps and textiles.
Camplin recently came across his old package design text books from his time as an undergraduate in graphic design and was inspired to create works for this exhibition. He focused on several different approaches with the idea of abstracted text and containment that includes: box designs, filling the paper, and dropping the box out of the design.
Camplin explains, “This communicates the idea of how we create frameworks for our writing in order to make coherent compositions. The box is a kind of device that holds the text like a piece of line paper holds a short essay. The works without the boxes are more like stream of consciousness writings and the filled drawings repeat like a long iambic pentameter poem.
”Todd Camplin was born in 1973 in South Bend, Indiana. In 1998 he earned a B.F.A. from Western Kentucky University. In 2006 he received an M.A. in Arts and Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. In the spring of 2010, he received an M.F.A. from the University of North Texas in Denton. He currently resides in Jefferson, Texas.