Scott Campbell

By exhibiting working class imagery customarily inked onto skin, tattoo-cum-visual artist Scott Campbell seeks to construct a new context for the genre. He uses copper, currency, graphite, ink, and neon, to transform tattoo subculture iconography into delicate and tempered artwork. For one series, Campbell sources uncut sheets of dollars directly from the United States Mint, to create large, intricate drawings with a sunken relief effect. These works employ the familiar blue-collar vernacular of tattoo flash-boards–a skull smoking a cigarette, a skeleton’s hand in a provocative gesture, a single eye emitting a penetrating ray–and highlight the irony that exists within that imagery. For another suite of prints, Campbell has used a tattoo gun to engrave a collection of copper plates to make a group of etchings. By using the same plates to compose the separate prints, the artist plays with visual semantics–how meaning changes through arrangement. Similarly flirting with interpretation, a series of morbid graphite drawings executed onto the interior of ostrich eggshells point out the delicacy of opposition of these fragile surfaces that represent birth and transformation.

Campbell owns and operates Saved Tattoo shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, whose client list includes New York's art and design elite, fashion designers such as Marc Jacobs, and a long roster of celebrities including Heath Ledger, Josh Hartnett, Orlando Bloom, Helena Christensen, and Penelope Cruz. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles, Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich, and Lazarides Gallery in London. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Deitch Projects in New York, Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre in Athens, Georgia, and Shizaru Gallery, London, among other venues.

Courtesy of WOWHUH Gallery