That human=breath vessel at the base of it is at the base of Jill Campoli’s VESSEL at her Little Field exhibition space which doesn’t say nearly enough about this two-channel video installation. VESSEL had the power to project itself from a side alley onto the hum of a Last Thursday via a giant mouth hovering above the space, breathing in and blowing out, drawing viewers into the alley and out of the fray. And it had the power that only something very quiet has with its stillness that is not stillness, the body doing nothing but what it does dumbly: breathe.

Campoli busted out of the vessel of the diminuitive, hundred-year-old garage that is Little Field with an improvised circular screen on the roof of the garage for the projection of the mouth while in the dark space itself, video of a male torso visibly inhaling and exhaling was projected on a floor-to-ceiling tube giving the flat projection a bit of dimensionality. The viewer was faced with the choice to stand well back to be able to see both projections, putting great distance between viewer and piece, or to approach the body at human scale and lose sight of the whole. VESSEL is the first work I’ve seen of Campoli’s, and I’m curious to see more.

REVISED: Jill’s surname now spelled correctly thanks to the ultimate fact-checker…her mom! Thanks Mom!