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 Screams.” Let Me Be An Object That Screams, edited by Matt Morris. Chicago: Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2017. 111. Print.