Cath Campbell
Everything we do corrects the space
1st November – 20th December 2014, Workplace Gateshead
Workplace Gallery is delighted to present Everything we do corrects the space our second solo exhibition of new work by Cath Campbell.
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.