Cath Campbell, for the yellow smoke, 2014

Two short films - 'for quartets' and 'for the yellow smoke' continue an on going process of appropriating, manipulating and deconstructing found images and documentary travel photography collected from publications and the internet. The films are made up of collected footage from travel diaries and documentaries found on YouTube depicting different American States - Alaska and California.

Each film is structured as a series of short acts, parts or chapters, and the content of each is determined by the narrative contained in the subtitles. In each found film clip, the original dialogue is translated through Google’s automatic captions, leading to a series of slight mistranslations that lends a poetic subtext to the work.

The disparate film clips are then carefully stitched together to create a dreamlike narrative that refers to the literary device of the 'inner monologue' or 'stream of consciousness' in which the writer attempts to remove rational thought, instead presenting the inner consciousness of the character. Each title is taken from a poem by T S Elliot, who uses this device in his work.

In making each work Campbell films the original video on her phone, direct from the computer screen, allowing the process to slightly distort the image and bleach the colour, and deliberately revealing the scratches and marks on the screen. These filmed clips are then edited and stitched together on her phone and uploaded back to You tube, where the final subtitles are them added, and the work is re- filmed to create the final work. This deliberately lo-fi mode of working intentionally reveals the layers of translation from the source material to final work, making apparent the fiction of the resulting film, and the contrasting experience of the artist and (documentary maker), in an attempt to explore relationship between reality, desire and experience.

Canary yellow with royal blue is an ongoing collection of short films that map a series of road trips across the American landscape, following classic literary and cinematic journeys. (Roughing It, Mark Twain; On the road, Jack Kerouac; Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck) 

Never having made these journeys herself, Cath makes each film by collaging together clips of each American state from amateur travel videos found on YouTube. The dialogue in each excerpt of found footage is translated by Google Automatic Captions, creating subtitles that are full of slight mistranslations lending a disquieting and poetic ambiguity to the original narrative. 

The footage is then stitched together to create short film-poems that refer to the idea of the ‘stream of consciousness’ – a narrative device used by Jack Kerouac, one of the key figures of the Beat Generation – in which the writer attempts to remove rational thought, instead presenting an inner consciousness.

The title Canary yellow with royal blue is an excerpt from a description of the location of the Six Gallery, San Francisco, which in 1955 hosted a poetry reading by a group of radical West Coast writers, who later became known as the Beat Generation. 

This collection of work aims to subvert the idea of the authoritative and singular male authors voice, becoming a deliberate feminist intervention that questions an art history that is primarily a masculine discourse centred on the notion of the individual, gifted creative ‘genius.’

Cath Campbell

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Cath Campbell