Anna Campbell makes elegant, precise, humorous, and poetic sculpture about queerness. She often references and meticulously rebuilds construction elements like scaffolding, cinder blocks, and sawhorses, and pairs them with equally high-crafted and frilly latex textiles. A balloon, a disco ball, a shopping cart, boxing gloves, a mink stole, a catcher’s mitt - these are some of the objects that occupy Anna’s material vernacular in semi-surrealist visual statements that assert a tough and tender stance of love, power and desire.- Liz Collins in Into that Fog: Queer|Art|Mentorship Fellows Exhibit, catalog, New York, NY, 2017. Print.
Anna Campbell’s “I have nothing to declare except my genius,” said Oscar Wilde to the customs agent. (2017) is a set of bronze fig leaves that quote from the convention of sculpted leaves to cover nudity during modest and repressive periods of art history. The leaves alone on a wall, each bulging suggestively, are more than simple phallic signifiers; they gesture to precisely a phantasmic actor or object of desire, and in so doing form a critique of how power is often masked in such institutional settings as white gallery walls (and the white bodies privileges in their proximity).
- Matt Morris in “Let Me Be an Evil Genie of Objects That Scream.” Let Me Be An Object That Screams, edited by Matt Morris. Chicago: Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2017. 111. Print.
'the ceremony that this /sash must adorn with panache is ambiguous and is many things at once in age, periodization, sex, and gender. Finally, the easy-to-miss unfilled space before the slash is forever, richly ill-defined to form “[?]/sash.” When it is not a sash, what is it?- Jongwoo Jeremy Kim in ““All Manner of ‘Becomings’”: The Ambiguous Pleasures of the Expanded Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.” ASAP Journal August 31, 2017. Web.
Now you see it and you don't. Or, more precisely, now you see it as you supplement it. The hands lighting the cigarette in ‘Invert (lighting)’ and holding the cigarette in ‘Invert (burning)’ brought me to memories of queer gallantry palpable enough to make me want to smoke again […] Other pieces in the collection ‘Etiquette Kit,’ which includes the ‘Silhouette Series,’ also reward lingering if you are thinking about the gendered visuals and materials of athleticism. Competition, posturing, come-hither bravado, protection (sort-of), how size matters […]
- Erica Rand in “Hip Openers: On the Visuals of Gendering Athleticism.” Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed, Routledge, 2017. 159, 161. Print.
Weaving queer narratives through her richly symbolic material, Campbell’s Etiquette Kit proves that conceptual art can still be subversive, outspoken, political and provocative.– Emily Colucci in Of Discoballs and Baseball Bats: Anna Campbell’s Queer Objects in ‘Etiquette Kit.’ Filthy Dreams. 22 Feb. 2015. Web.