Bio/Statement
Damon Campagna is an MFA 2D graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. A painter and printmaker from Rhode Island, his practice is informed by his experience working in the museum field, specifically documenting 9/11 World Trade Center-related artifacts for the New York City Fire Department. This experience intensely shapes and affects Damon’s practice, which involves the analysis, logging, and curation of self through markmaking, and the ramifications of that pursuit. The possibility that we may form self-image and examine our existence through a self-curated collection of our creations is fascinating to him. Damon also attempts to bridge the gap between printmaking and immersive installation in much of his work. He held exhibitions at Providence’s AS220 in 2017 and Providence's Chazan Gallery in 2019 and was included in Abigail Ogilvy Gallery’s 2019 Fresh Faces exhibition in Boston. Damon presented his thesis work at MassMoCA in May 2019 and is preparing for a 4-week MassMoCA residency in 2021.
If one assumes basic markmaking is as unique to the human being as a heartbeat, running gait or sleep pattern, can it be similarly quantified, recorded and studied? Would this enable one to establish any sort of deeper, ontological “meaning” behind one’s art, and if so, what would it reveal? A painter and printmaker, my practice is informed by my experience working in the museum field, specifically documenting 9/11 World Trade Center-related artifacts for the New York City Fire Department. This experience intensely shapes and affects my practice. Through various artistic modes, including bridging between 2D and installation and video, I examine methods in which the most elemental markmaking information, lines and loops, might be recorded and documented in an existential attempt to define “self." I believe that each mark is still the product of a specific individual and, by extension, even the reproduction introduced by the press is discrete and unique. All of my pieces are wholly realized entities, but additionally serve as objects of study in my installation work, which involves documenting and cataloging the self through the mark. As this metaphysical data of self is methodically documented and archived, I also ponder the consequences of obsessively producing and collecting one’s own work in an existential pursuit of the unknowable.
