Charles Campbell: Breath Portraits
Wil Aballe, Vancouver, BC
In a public interview on the occasion of his 2023 exhibition An Ocean to Livity at the Surrey Art Gallery, Jamaican-born artist Charles Campbell shared with curator Elliott Ramsey how his Breath Portraits began with an earlier work, Maroonscape 3:
Finding Accompong, first exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2021 show Vancouver Special: Disorientations and Echo. Campbell wanted to create a large-scale sculpture that would serve as a gathering place, so he chose to make a tree. As for the form that tree would take, he chose the lower portion of the human respiratory system, only to invert it.
“That was really in response to what was happening in the world in 2020,” says Campbell, “and particularly with the murder of George Floyd, the phrase ‘I can’t breathe’ being such a prevalent and important political point that the Black communities worldwide were making. But at the same time I found that phrase was always a constant reminder of the abject state of Blackness. It was this thing that would kind of take my breath away when I would hear it. And I wanted to create this monument to Black breath and community that would stand in the gallery and be a space for people to assemble around.”
The vertically oriented, plank-shaped light boxes that house Campbell’s Breath
Portraits were constructed after the artist had subjected breath samples collected from Black elders present for his parallel
Black Breath Spectacle performance to a spectrograph. The results show not only the colours of the breath but also, as
Ramsey points out, “their rhythms.” Displayed together, these works achieve a choral effect, a gathering like no other.
Opening reception Nov 13, 6–8pm
