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Susan Ressler (ed.), "It's All About the Apple, Or is it?" Women Artists of the American West, West Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Press.
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/waaw/ressler/Ressleressay1.html#Campbell
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Artists-American-Susan-Ressler/dp/078641054X
Excerpt:
Rational Being is the central image in a series of five "stained glass windows" created by Kathleen Campbell, entitled Modern Theology Or a Universe of Our Own Creation. As in "It's All About the Apple, Or is it?" the "Or" in her title suggests alternatives to theological conventions. Constructed of Duratrans, a photo-based and mass produced material used in commercial applications (such as back-lit Kodak advertisements found in most camera stores), Modern Theology queries the conflation of commerce, science and spirit while infusing a beatific light that suggests redemptive possibilities.
Eleanor Heartney, "Art and the Spiritual," essay in Thresholds: Art and the Spiritual: Expressions of Art and Spiritual Life," exhibition catalogue, City Gallery at Waterfront Park, Charleston, SC, December 4, 2003 - February 1, 2004.
Excerpt:
An even more critical view of our failure to be stewards of nature appears in works from Kathleen Campbell's Modern Theology or a Universe of Our Own Creation. Updating the stained glass tradition with the use of electronically illuminated light boxes, she presents ironically conceived saints and angels who preside over a technological society, which has lost its connection both to nature and God.
Jolene Rickard, essay in Modern Theology Or A Universe of Our Own Creation, exhibition catalogue, Castellani Art Museum, Niagara University, November 12, 1995 - February 11,1996
Excerpt:
John Mohawk, a contemporary Seneca historian, has argued that, "The genesis myth not only displaced humans from Nature, but substituted the Church for the metaphorical earth as mother and placed a pope or priest as father figure instead of the sky spirit world." Here Rational Being appears as Adam, acknowledging the expulsion from the garden and reverberating through history the environment created by the assumption of western scientific rationalists and the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Campbell appears to imply, the west's token acknowledgement of the destructiveness of its methods and assumptions is no longer enough. Dead birds suffocated by crude oil are the lexicon of popular culture. Yet these omnipresent images reveal a kind of subterfuge - the depiction of destruction becoming, in a way, a contemporary ruse, allowing society to acknowledge the on-going destruction of life while not having to accept the responsibility of change. While the encroaching objects and images in her installation - black plastic, black oil and black burnt coals on the earth's topsoil - light the room with their softly beautiful glow, they reveal a society gridded and trapped in a rationalist mode that no longer seems capable of sustaining life. Once the west rejected Paracelsus" argument that "the whole world is knit and bound within itself: for the world is a living creature" - these dead birds were born.
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