About this Event
Spinning Home Movies #20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell
ON VIEW MARCH 9TH-MARCH 14
GALLERY HOURS: 1:00PM-5:00PM
As part of its 20th Anniversary celebration, the South Side Home Movie Project presents Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell, a week-long exhibition that showcases the materiality, architecture and temporality of home through archival films and architectural design. In the first ever Spinning Home Movies exhibition, Jason Campbell presents an original work that combines elements of his own artistic practice with SSHMP’s Ramon Williams Collection.
Artist and architect Jason Campbell transports The Linen Closet, originally exhibited as part of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, to the Arts Incubator gallery. An open cedar frame carries donated quilts and comforters, creating a monument to the ritual, improvisational practice of homemaking. In its new location, images sampled from the Ramon Williams Collection at the South Side Home Movie Project are projected onto The Linen Closet, expanding its material archive of home to include home movie recordings.
Ramon Williams was an IBEW electrician, entrepreneur, and amateur filmmaker who documented public life in and around his neighborhood of Bronzeville. His collection, donated to the South Side Home Movie Project in 2020, includes over 300 film reels captured between the 1940s and the 1960s. From parades, performances, sporting events and fashion shows, Williams’ films are rare glimpses into the vibrant civic life of the historic Black neighborhood.
Unlike many of the collections archived at the South Side Home Movie Project, Williams’ films primarily document public events occurring beyond the domestic confines of a family home. And yet, the collection of films retain the intimacy typically reserved for home movie recordings. To foreground this intimacy, Campbell collects still frames from Williams’ films that capture moments of direct eye contact between Williams’ camera and his subjects. Excised from their moving image context and assembled into photo albums, these stills become an archive of presence where Williams, his subjects and visitors to the gallery share a collective interior in the midst of Black public life.
The gaze collapses the divide between public documentation and private memory. Historically, Black presence in public space has been surveilled, regulated, or rendered hyper visible. When subjects look directly into Ramon Williams' camera, the look is not passive, it reclaims the frame. The gaze signals: this is ours; we recognize who is filming; we belong here. By extracting only these moments, civic documentation is transformed into something that behaves like a family archive, where being seen is not extractive but relational. Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell invites us to view projected images from within The Linen Closet, to explore the photo albums of stills, and to consider the “stilling” power of the gaze.
Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell is presented with generous support from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 East Garfield Boulevard, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
