Cath Campbell 'Canary yellow with royal blue' DLI Museum & Durham Art Gallery, Durham, UK
When I'm not sleeping, Cath Campbell, 2016, HD video, 9:03 mins, Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK
Cath Campbell
Canary yellow with royal blue
DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery,
January 23rd - March 31st 2016
Preview: 6-8pm, Thursday January 21st 2016.
For 'Canary yellow with royal blue' Cath Campbell presents a new collection of short films. 'When I'm not sleeping', 'Taking a deep breath that I don't let out' and 'To the valley' each follow the routes of a classic American road trip - and as such are heavy with romantic reference and cinematic imagery interrupted by strangely banal and absurd moments from the minutiae of the personal lives of the original authors.
Deliberately lo-fi in both their process and aesthetic, the films are made by collaging together clips from amateur travel videos found on YouTube. The dialogue in each clip is translated by Google automatic captions, and the resulting subtitles are full of slight mis-translations that provide a disquieting and poetic quality to the narrative. The clips are stitched together to create short film-poems that refer to the idea of the 'stream of consciousness' - a literary device in which the writer attempts to remove rational thought, instead presenting the inner consciousness of the characters.
Campbell's work encompasses drawing, photography, film, sculpture, installation and large-scale architectural interventions. With a particular interest in the meaning invested in an object or image when dislocated from its original surroundings and placed within a new context, Campbell appropriates, collects and collages found images and materials, usually sourced from the Internet. This information is then put through a process of manipulation, repetition and rearrangement and then is re-presented to question the relationship between reality, desire and personal experience.
Cath Campbell was born in 1972 in Ilkeston, UK. She studied Fine Art at Newcastle University. Recent exhibitions include: Everything we do connects the space Workplace Gallery, (Gateshead, UK) Fifty ways to leave your lover, Open Space, (Cologne, Germany), A foreign encounter, Gallery FOE 156 (Munich Germany), Mostyn Open 2013, Oriel Mostyn (Llandudno, Wales), Enter Slowly The Lab (San Fransisco, USA). Public and architectural commissions include Untitled (Trellis), Trinity Hall, (Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK), 21 Arches instead of a gate, Waltham Forest Borough Council (London, UK) and Marathon, Yards Park (Washington DC, USA).
Cath is represented by Workplace Gallery, Gateshead. She lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne.
My mum was a beatnik / Canary yellow with royal blue, a series of public readings will be performed at Baltic 39, Newcastle, from February 9th - 15th 2016
Canary yellow with royal blue will tour to The Priestman Gallery, Sunderland University, May 2016, and York college Gallery, November 2016.
DLI Museum and Durham Art Gallery, Aykley Heads, Durham, DH1 5TU
Opening Times: Wednesdays to Sundays all year 10.30am - 4.00pm, and 10.30am-4.00pm on Tuesdays during school holidays and half-terms and all Bank Holidays.
This exhibition is supported by Arts Council England
Workplace Gallery is a contemporary art gallery run by artists.
Based in Gateshead UK, Workplace Gallery represents a portfolio of emerging and established artists through the gallery programme, curatorial projects and international art fairs.