Campbell’s Breath Portraits translate the transient idiosyncrasies of breath into glowing abstract images. Using recordings from his ongoing Black Breath Archive, the images capture one tenth to one hundredth of a second of breath, freezing the briefest moment of life’s ongoing and most essential process. Here Campbell presents part of the original set of Breath Portraits, featuring friends, colleagues and senior members of British Columbia’s Black community.
Campbell describes the process of recording the breath as deeply intimate. “What’s communicated sitting in a quiet room listening to breath is extraordinary. The Breath Portraits become that experience.”
Beginning with the early stages of his investigations into the preciousness of Black breath, Campbell’s 2021 performace at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Black Breath Spectacle, turned the simple act of breathing into a response to the poor representation of Black people in art institutions and a meditation on collective power and vulnerability. Viewers convened around Campbell’s monumental sculpture, Maroonscape 3 Finding Accompong, which references both a tree and the bronchial structure of human lungs, emphasizing the importance and precarity of a single breath.
This body of work led to major institutional exhibitions across Canada notably at The Power Plant, and the Surrey Art Gallery, where his Breath Portraits where first exhibited. Campbell’s work on Black breath as archive culminated in the exhibition, how many colours has the sea, 2024, co-commissioned by the Toronto Biennial of Art and the National Gallery of Canada.
Campbell’s Breath Portraits make their way back to the West Coast, in the artist’s solo exhibition at Wil Aballe, 2025. Campbell considers these works as having a presence, almost like sentinels or evocative of ancestors, imbued with an almost spiritual dimension.
Charles Campbell is a Jamaican born multidisciplinary artist, writer and curator based on lək̓ʷəŋən territory, Victoria BC. Using sculpture, sound, installation and performance, his work pulls at the threads of time. Finding channels into the past and future Campbell reconstructs broken somatic, communal and spiritual connections, creating spaces of solace and meaning for all of us living in the wake of slavery and colonization.
Campbell’s artworks have been exhibited widely in the Caribbean, Canada and internationally, including the Havana Biennial, Cuenca Biennial and Kingston Biennial. Recent exhibitions include The Other Side of Now (Perez Art Museum Miami), How Not to Be Seen (Remai Modern), Vancouver Special (Vancouver Art Gallery), Fragments of Epic Memory (Art Gallery of Ontario) and solo exhibitions Ocean to Livity (Surrey Art Gallery, Nanaimo Art Gallery, Goldfarb Gallery) and How many colours has the sea (The Power Plant Gallery). His public art installations can be seen at the Victoria Airport, Concordia University and Royal BC Museum (2026). Campbell is the recipient of numerous grants from the Canada Council and BC Arts Council, the 2022 VIVA Award, 2020 City of Victoria Creative Builder Award and was long listed for the 2025 Sobey Art Award.
