“Campbell’s most recent body of work is comprised of stretched linen canvas wrapped in simulated packing materials. Working exclusively with acrylic paint, she creates bubble wrap, cardboard, packing tape, and plastic sheeting which she then applies to a stretched support. The work is mimetic—a direct copy of a real thing—but also a representation of painting, that is, a painting of a painting. As writer Nancy Tousley observes in her recent feature in Canadian Art, Campbell’s work “turns on improbable dualities.” By the artists’ own admission, “the finished works are at once complete and incomplete, abstract and real, referential and self-referential.”1 The replicated materials are so convincing and the premise so conceptually plausible that her paintings have been dismissed as merely ‘the real thing.’ This productive confusion is the source of material interest and conceptual intrigue. Here, illusion and allusion operate in equal measure to point to possibilities outside of strictly formal and material concerns. —Troy Gronsdahl, At the Threshold of Appearances, 2016. Exhibition Text for Mono/Chromatic, College Art Galleries, University of Saskatchewan, 2016.

1. Tousley, Nancy. “Is What You See Really What You See? Tammi Campbell’s Dialogue with Modernism.” Canadian Art, Spring 2014: pp. 96-102.