The word familiar is a shape-shifting term. It can be used to describe something sentimental and comforting, or strange and unsettling. For Campbell and Czuj, what the word really speaks to is a moment of recognition that triggers in us an embodied experience: a sense of knowing, but not fully. It is this slippage that both artists are concerned with in their practices. As artists who are inspired by the poignant contexts of materials and objects, both Campbell and Czuj work with the encoded meanings and associations within the components they use. What does it mean to see something familiar in something new, and something new in something familiar? This question lies at the heart of Familiar.
The contemporary world is full of objects. The industrial revolution allowed human beings to begin producing specific objects millions of times over and spread them all over the world, but these objects also hold context and characteristics specific to those cultures that made them. These cultures aren’t dependent on these objects, and these objects aren’t dependent on these cultures, but the entanglement these objects hold with where and why they were initially produced is a sociocultural context that can never be erased. These previous lives and associations are just as much material in these two artists' hands as the objects they use. This entanglement of meaning with material is central to both of their practices, and for that reason, their work recognizes one another.
— Scott Vincent Campbell & Grant Czuj, June 2021