Occasionally I awaken from a dream in which an external voice utters a profound phrase. Sometimes there are images; usually the resonant utterance is all I remember. If I believed in God this would surely be a sign; I accept it as a pleasingif perplexingmovement of the mind. I want to know who you’d be in the best of all possible worlds could be such a phrase, lingering long after awakening, steering the day into a philosophical investigation of utopia and identity. Perhaps in response to his own question, Michael Campbell offers us a tableau of scaled-down details from the built world, the social order, and the natural environment. We are presented with several fragments: a model representing portions of a furnished room; an audio loop of a child’s voice singing; a video loop of a canoe floating downstream in the mist. We are free to move among these elements that portray a credible, integrated scenario. There is an idyllic air throughout; but complications sneak into the room, enter the picture, haunt the songis it not always so? In this scene, plaster oozes through the back of the jerry-built wall fragments, the abandoned canoe drifts by in flames, the disembodied voice seems to sing of
death. In this utopia, nothing is perfect, and maybe that’s the point. We’re forever unreconciled with the world, but here we are. Maybe this is the best of all possible worldswhat are we going to do with it?

Essay by Daniel Olson