dadtori.pages.dev

Charles campbell biography

    •

Charles Campbell’s installation at The Power Plant speaks to African Diasporic healing, connecting past and present through sculpture and collective breathing. His work looks closely at the history of the Middle Passage – the transatlantic slave journey which shipped an estimated 12 million enslaved Black African peoples across the Atlantic Ocean over the course of 400 years. Campbell has used bathymetric readings beneath the Atlantic Ocean to collect data in locations where many ships sank and over 2 million African lives were tragically lost at sea. His installation uses these underwater measurements and re-creates the atmosphere by suspending a sculptural installation from the ceiling mirroring the submerged terrain where the African and North American plates meet. Surrounding the sculpture on the walls are nine coloured panels depicting audio spectrogram images created from the sound of breathing, gathered from Campbell’s preparatory workshops. For more information on this process, visit The Black Breath Archive.

Campbell’s installation serves as a pathway to African

    •

Q & A: Charles Campbell

Born in Jamaica a half century ago, multidisciplinary artist Charles Campbell has exhibited worldwide, often using interventions and performances to explore aspects of Black history, particularly those connected to the Caribbean. Campbell, a former chief curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, is now based in Victoria, where he also finds time to work for change in Canadian art institutions as an educator, writer and activist.

Campbell’s exhibition, as it was, as it should have been, on view at Vancouver’s Wil Aballe Art Projects from Oct. 24 to Nov. 21, includes pieces connected to ongoing projects that involve community, performance and a deep dive into Jamaica’s history and culture. His paintings and prints, along with a sound installation and sculpture, relate to themes of migration, where boundaries are challenged and new futures imagined.

A second project, Time Catcher: The Fruiting of Chaos, is a $100,000 public art commission at the Victoria International Airport. The piece features beautiful wooden vessels inscribed with the words o

    •

Biography

Charles Campbell is a Jamaican born multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator whose practice animates the future imaginaries possible in the wake of slavery and colonization. His artworks, which include sculptures, paintings, sonic installations and performances, have been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. Recent exhibitions include Vancouver Special, Disorientations and Echo at the Vancouver art Gallery, Fragments of Epic Memory at the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Other Side of Now at the Perez Art Museum Miami. Campbell is the recipient of the 2022 VIVA Award and the 2020 City of Victoria Creative Builder Award. He holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith College and a BFA from Concordia University. He currently lives and works on lək̓ʷəŋən territory, Victoria BC.

curriculum vitae

Copyright ©dadtori.pages.dev 2025