NEW YORK.- Beth Campbell’s widely diverse body of work investigates notions of the ordinary and the everyday, which are made strange, new, and unfamiliar by the artist’s clever hand. Beth Campbell: Following Room recently opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and remains on view in the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery through February 24. In this site-specific installation, Campbell arranges replicas of a reading room into a grid of mirrored pairs, evoking the trompe l’oeil of a three-dimensional infinity mirror. This is the first major New York museum presentation of Campbell’s work.

Tina Kukielski, the Whitney’s senior curatorial assistant who organized the exhibition, writes in an essay that accompanies the show: “For artist Beth Campbell, the investigation of the anxiety-inducing aspects of memory and counter-memory, pattern recognition and its rupture, is an anchor of her practice. For Campbell, this exploration is oftentimes personal, and she positions her installations, videos, sculptures, and drawings in close relation to her own subjective view. Yet complicating what appears at first glance to be a facsimile of life is the artist’s masterful ability to confound any expectation. Scenarios repeat in seemingly countless iterations and, in turn, what existed on the plane of the banal becomes twisted and distorted, challenging the limits of human perception.”

Beth Campbell was born in Illinois in 1971, and now lives and works in New York. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (1997); Ohio University, Athens, Ohio (MFA, 1997); and Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri (BFA, 1993). She began exhibiting in 1997, and has had solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York; Sala Diaz, San Antonio; Art Basel, Miami Beach; Art Academy of Cincinnati; Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles, Roebling Hall, Brooklyn; and White Columns, New York. She has also participated in shows at Artists Space, New York; the 6th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Bronx Museum, Bronx; and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City. In 2007, Campbell collaborated with the Public Art Fund on her project Potential Store Fronts at 125 Maiden Lane, New York, New York. Her work is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; New School University, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. She is the recent recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2006).