Monday, March 28, 2022, 6 pm ET
Free; click here to see how to attend

University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study’s PLASMA (Performances, Lectures, and Screenings in Media Art) brings to Buffalo celebrated theorists and artists who are exhibiting in some of the world’s most renowned museums and galleries, and writing on the cutting edge of new media theory and expression. As part of PLASMA, Squeaky Wheel is excited to co-present a virtual artist talk with artist Crystal Z Campbell, who was a Workspace Resident with Squeaky Wheel in 2021, and whose upcoming exhibition at Buffalo Arts Studio we are co-presenting.

Each PLASMA event brings internationally celebrated artists to discuss varied arts practices, models, modes, examples, and experiences in media arts.

The series serves as a kind of hub as to how courses in new media, digital poetics, game studies, locative media, robotics, installation, media theory and performance arts can be experienced.

In this series you can see and interact with artists that you would encounter in New York, Europe and Latin America, offering of a rich experience for the University at Buffalo, the city and Western New York.

The series provides, not expressive answers, but raises intriguing questions, exploring new avenues in the digital age, who we are, how we interact and where we are going.

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipino, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—rumored information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Recent works revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’s “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification. Campbell is a Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellow (2020-2021) living and working in Oklahoma, and founder of archiveacts.com. Campbell was recently named a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts.

PLASMA 2022 is sponsored by the University at Buffalo’s Department of Media Study and funding is provided by the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. The series is curated by Dr. Paige Sarlin, Assistant Professor of Media Study, in collaboration with Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center.

Banner image: Portrait of Crystal Z Campbell, a Black and Asian artist in the studio gazing directly into camera, with just above the shoulder length curly hair wrangled into a half-ponytail. Light from the industrial window creates a pink and reddish glow on their cheek, filtered through a transparency the artist is holding. The transparency is a film still from a found 35mm film the artist found at a now demolished Black Civil Rights Theater. The photograph is courtesy of Melissa Lukenbaugh.