Charles Campbell’s An Ocean to Livity Exhibit at NAG

On October 13th, multidisciplinary Jamaican artist Charles Campbell unveiled his exhibition “An Ocean to Livity” at the Nanaimo Art Gallery. This piece makes primary use of his Black Breath Archive, which is composed of various audio clips of Black-identifying participants breathing. These audio clips are transformed to become an audio-visual experience through an “oceanic” spectrogram structure.

According to the exhibition’s introduction, “Livity is a Rastafarian word that can either mean way of life or the life force present in every living thing. The artworks in Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity evoke a sense of journey, worldly interconnectedness, and communal struggle against the injustices of times past and present, geographies far and near.”

Campbell’s piece started as an auditory experience. Campbell began by creating a collection of audio files and finding a way to represent them by “specializing [their significance] in context of a room, and thinking about how to physically present it in a space.”

Campbell guided each participant through meditative breathing, encouraging them to think of a past loved one, while producing Black Breath Archive. Campbell wanted to convey they were “not just carrying themselves, but those who came before them as well.”

 “People go very deeply into these connections with people in their pasts,” Campbell says, so the experience was an “intimate moment between strangers” in which they exchanged rich stories of their past.

Adrian Sitanimezi, a second-year student at Vancouver Island University (VIU), shares his experience with Campbell: “Right away, the project had a very clear message: ‘Taking breaths for those who couldn’t.’ It was a very rewarding experience.” Sitanimezi says the experience was “peaceful, almost like a breathwork session.”

Campbell describes his multidimensional work as: “being able to play with different mediums, going deeper into the process to treat each medium to work out what conveys best.”

VIU English and Creative Writing Professor Sonnet L’Abbé, wrote the official description of Campbell’s exhibition. As a fellow Black-identifying artist L’Abbe says, “In poetry teaching, I like to engage students in responding to the physical world around them, asking them to respond to visual art or nature.”

 “Campbell’s work demonstrates tensions around race and representation, which affects all of us, not just Black people can learn from it….Through the events following George Floyd’s murder, we all experienced the world going through this,” says L’Abbe.

L’Abbe writes, “From the intimacy of a quiet inhalation to the distance between continents, Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity brings together metal and mixed media sculptures along with immersive and participatory multichannel audio installations. Tapping into the Black diasporic imagination, Campbell reconstructs and reinvents lost connections, lamenting the violent disruptions of the past while constructing a home for Black communities’ strength of being.”

L’Abbe adds, “Campbell strips away racial hierarchies and holds up Black breath as its own force—a carrier of ancestry and experience, a creator of community and something that, even in its most subtle presentation, changes the way we think, feel, and live.”

The gallery page goes on to explain that the oxygen we breathe is given the shape of lichen. of the bronchial structure of a human lung, of the forked shapes of slave yokes used to tie captives together in a line) These are a “nod to fractal geometry and binary counting systems that originated in Africa,” says L’Abbe.

Campbell’s artwork takes in sculpture, painting, sonic installations, and performances. They have been exhibited widely in Canada and internationally including 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, but Campbell’s work has traveled to Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, the US. Campbell’s next project focuses on “how we care for the ones we’ve lost, specifically the ones that were lost in the middle passage in Trans-Atlantic slavery.”

The “Charles Campbell: An Ocean to Livity” exhibition is on at the Nanaimo Art Gallery until January 14th, 2024.