Cath Campbell
About this work
'Canary yellow with royal blue' Series,
(2014 - ongoing)
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.’