Faculty Work Feature: Robert Campbell
Cornish Art faculty Robert Campbell was featured on the Center for Contemporary Arts‘ Currents New Media to share about his work on his animation and video piece featuring Cornish dance students.
Cornish Art Faculty Robert Campbell on “Journal Entry”
Robert Campbell was invited to write about his work on “Journal Entry,” an animation, video, and dance piece that began in the summer of 2020 as a response to the annual wildfires. He writes, “in addition to the focus on smoke in the air, the chaotic urban imagery in Journal Entry is also focused on the felt effects of the intensity and scale of the destruction/construction (another big source of air pollution) in the city where I work.” He also discusses his process working with dancers from Cornish:
In Spring of 2021, I was offered a chance to teach a course titled Creating Digital Performance in the Dance Department at Cornish as a pandemic replacement for a Cornish Dance Theater experience where Dance students work with a faculty choreographer to create an original work performed live in a series of evening performances near the end of the semester. So I began working with a small group of dancers each Saturday, inviting improvisational movement as well as scripted events into various green screen facilities to collect footage to integrate with the digitally constructed environments…
Music: Steve Peters
Special thanks to: Sarah Haskell, Mark Mcloughlin. Victoria Watts. and Cornish College of the Arts.
Professor Robert Campbell is a visual artist working in digital compositing and collage, installation, performance, and documentary. His work has been exhibited in venues nationally and internationally, including the Frye Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery, MoNA, Whatcom Museum, Currents International New Media Festival, and various other museums, festivals, and galleries across in the U.S. and abroad.
His recent performance-based collaborations have been featured at On the Boards, MOXsonic Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival, and Lincoln Center. He has produced documentaries in Italy, Ukraine, Cambodia, Zambia, and South Africa, with excerpts of his work selected for the “Journey to Planet Earth” series on the PBS network.