Shawn Camp | Selected Passages

Exhibition Dates: March 10 – April 10

ICOSA Collective is proud to present Selected Passages, a collection of sound works by Shawn Camp.

Things are Looking Up, 2016, 9 minutes, 37 seconds

This piece is built around a variation of the Shepard Tone - an auditory illusion where pitch appears to continually change in one direction. In this work, melodic passages intertwine with ever-rising natural notes to form an A minor / C major scale - bookended by clips captured from the philosophical ponderings of the artist’s 4-year-old son. The concept of infinity and the passage of time and human experience permeate the work’s atmosphere that gradually rises in intensity and then falls over the course of the 9½-minute piece.

Above Every Plane, 2012, 12 minutes, 35 seconds.

Featuring a collage of recorded sounds that document various states of moving water, this work alternates between near silence and sometimes jarring tonal structures. Melodic passages weave in and out. Tension builds and releases, over and over, across different settings. At times frightening and at times soothing, the impression of a narrative emerges, tracing the sometimes-treacherous path of melting ice and snow from high mountains to the ocean, back to the sky, then starting all over again in repeating cycles.

Shawn Camp grew up in Coeur dʼ Alene, Idaho and completed an MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1997. He then set out exploring, artmaking, and exhibiting throughout the United States and abroad as an artist and musician. He settled in Austin, Texas where he is a member of ICOSA artist collective and Associate Professor of Painting at Austin Community College. His works have been shown in the United States and internationally and are included in numerous public and private collections. Shawn’s paintings, videos and sound pieces exploit the effects of context and light on our perception - contrasting the ephemeral nature of awareness with the illusion of constancy.