Poignant Portfolio no 47: Nicole Campanello's "In the Interim"
“As humans, we feel uneasy when confronted with a void. We see it as an unimaginable emptiness in us that must be occupied. However, it can be a reconstructive period of healing from the past; rediscovering things forgotten.”
Trail
In 2016, I went to Fotofest. It was my first portfolio review, and I was petrified. I had no clue what to expect, even though I took two seminars on preparing for them and had all the materials I was told I should have. Because of the dates I got scheduled into, I missed my kid's prom (which, at the last minute, he had decided to attend.)
Fotofest was huge, very cliquish, and, to me, extremely overwhelming. Although the weather was predicted to be more in line with my Hawai'i wardrobe, it instead took a cold snap; I was freezing, had nothing vaguely warm to wear, and there were no stores located near that section of Houston. An hour after getting off the plane, I sat across from my first reviewer. They said, "I have no idea why you would bring this work (my Self-Exposure photo collages) to a PHOTO review." And who can forget the Uber driver from hell I endured when another participant and I decided to leave an evening event early...the scariest, most mentally unbalanced driver I have ever ridden with. Despite all this, I met a couple of excellent reviewers with whom I have maintained a long-term relationship, made some acquaintances, and had the luck of meeting Nicole Campanello. What likely cemented the friendship between Nicole and me was that we both had ended our first day with the same genuinely horrible reviewer. You may have encountered this type yourself. They pretend to listen intently and then proceed to slay people's work without considering anything you said. The person told me, and I will never forget this, "If you want to make work about life as an American woman, then you need to research what that is like." (Seriously? Did you think before you said this? I have done that research. It's called living my entire life as an American woman in the United States.) They said my work had zero content but was all about, "Look what I can make Photoshop do." (I never worked on the series in Photoshop, and I had said as much.) I remember Nicole noted what they said to her was equally confounding. We later met another person who claimed this person was so cruel that she cried in the women's room after their meeting.
Though my contact with Nicole over the past five years has been sporadic, we have maintained our friendship over the distance. I watched from afar as she developed this series entitled In the Interim. Based on her lived experience, she told me it was conceived by "exploring the transitional experience we go through between one season of life and the next. Each image represents an aspect of my emotions during that time." Given that I love work ripped from one's soul like this, it is easy to guess that I loved this one as soon as I saw the first image she made. I still love this series several years later and go back to look at it frequently. I'm saddened that other aspects of Campanello's life precluded her from doing a follow-on series because I anxiously awaited her next one! But I am sure it will arrive when the time is right.
In the Interim is almost stark in its minimalism compared to most environmental portraiture. The large amount of white in most images leaves it feeling clean and bright, but once you look beyond that, you see something mysterious, perhaps sad or slightly sinister, happening. We never get to see the woman's face. Even her body is largely hidden in many of the images. It leaves me curious to explore why the photos are like that, to ask questions, and to keep finding answers. Beyond the conceptual content, Campanello makes beautiful images. Several left me feeling, "I wish I had thought of that," or "I wish I made that." In the Interim takes us on an unsettled journey through uncertainty, invisibility, and liminality. The series speaks to me personally, as well as speaking to my photographic aesthetic. It's a well-conceived and executed body of work that provides the curious viewer with a rewarding experience.
Well done, Nicole!
—Diana Nicholette Jeon
In the Interim
How do we get from one stage of life to the next? Is it as easy as walking through a door, or more like crossing through a passageway between two doors?
We have a transitional period, like an interlude between acts of a play. It may pass in the proverbial blink of an eye but feel more like an arduous trek through unfamiliar terrain. Because, as humans, we feel uneasy when confronted with a void. We see it as an unimaginable emptiness in us that must be occupied. However, it can be a reconstructive period of healing from the past, rediscovering things forgotten, and putting experience into much-needed perspective. It's a time of preparation for our emergence at the next doorway. The images in this series were inspired by such a period in my own life, and have been relevant in times since then. It is both challenging and rewarding: a time of realization and learning, a place of healing, growing, and searching for that next stage.
—Nicole Campanello
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Artist Bio
Nicole Campanello is a photographic artist based in Houston, TX. A visual storyteller, she creates narrative images and series’ rooted in an exploration of the past, memories, and most recently, place. Her work has been featured in shows at Pictura Gallery, Bloomington, IN, and Hallie Brown Ford Gallery, Roseburg, OR, and in group shows across the United States, as well as internationally, including Tilt Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, and PH21 Gallery, Budapest, Hungary. Campanello has won several awards, and her photographs have been featured in SHOTS Magazine and Ain’t Bad Magazine. She obtained her BA in Photography with Studio Art minor summa cum laude in 2009 from Sam Houston University, Huntsville, TX.
See more of her work at: https://www.nicolecampanello.com
Diana Nicholette Jeon is an award-winning artist based in Honolulu, HI, who works primarily with lens-based media. Her work has been seen both internationally and nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Jeon holds an MFA from UMBC.