More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings

Colin Campbell (1942-2001) is widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of video art for his provocative, thoughtful, and wry depictions of sexuality, gender, and social norms and expectations. Born in Reston, Manitoba, he received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School in California. He began teaching at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, where he made his first video works including the influential Sackville, I’m Yours (1972). He moved to Toronto in the early 1970s where he taught at OCAD University and the University of Toronto. The creator of more than fifty video works including Hollywood and Vine (1977), Bad Girls (1980), and Dangling by Their Mouths (1981), Campbell was also active in the artist-run centre movement, helping to establish Vtape, Canada’s largest distributor of video art.

More Voice-Over: Colin Campbell Writings gathers for the first time a broad selection of Campbell’s writings for video and beyond. It includes scripts as well as magazine articles, artists’ books, lectures, short fiction, and excerpts from his two unpublished novels. In these witty and perceptive texts, Campbell considers desire and longing, sexuality and gender, power, history, his own artistic practice and community, artist-run culture, video and its audiences, censorship, the AIDS crisis, and more. Covering three decades, More Voice-Over illuminates Campbell’s development as a central figure in the history of video art as well as the importance of writing to his work and to video as an artistic medium.