All this is aesthetically stunning, though somewhat intangible, initially, and it could remain so without recourse to specifics: the linear forms of the hanging sculpture, for example, correspond to bathymetric readings of the Atlantic\u2019s seafloor at the precise point where the African and North American tectonic plates meet. The coloured aluminum panels are audio spectrograms rendered from sound recordings of the breath of Campbell\u2019s friends, colleagues, and community. Through a sophisticated blend of sound, light, form, and colour, the installation conjures two commensurately unrepresentable subjects: the abyssal depths of the ocean floor as a space both imagined and specific, and the unfathomable losses of life that occurred during the Middle Passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carefully working through difficult topics involving grief, mourning, colonization, and emancipation, Campbell avoids the pitfalls of aestheticizing trauma, or of evoking painful histories directly, by finding conceptual ground from which to produce works that do not deny somatic or bodily experiences. Rather, what is held or felt in the body is realized through abstraction. The apparent simplicity of his geometric constructions paradoxically permits an unravelling of meaning through personal, historical, social, or embodied readings. He frequently calls upon viewers to respond to the past through the present and to consider their own positionality to Blackness vis-\u00e0-vis the histories he raises and the narratives that unfold. To elicit such a range of subjective responses\u200a\u2014\u200aaccountability, connection, love, mourning, responsibility, grief, awareness, and many more\u200a\u2014\u200arequires careful attention to process, which also raises the question of form. If abstraction can be understood as a strategy for expressing political meaning in art, how does that meaning register for audiences? By beginning from specific sources\u200a\u2014\u200adata sets, metrics, audio recordings, GPS maps\u200a\u2014\u200aCampbell develops and expands a work\u2019s interpretive possibilities, even as he reduces its visual components. Through a practice of removal, by withholding a certain amount of information about process or detail, Campbell achieves a tension between the actual and the abstract, mediated between data (or concept) and aesthetics (or experience) such that the political stance of the work can be produced through perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Campbell<\/strong>
An Ocean to Livity<\/em>, exhibition view, Surrey Art Gallery, 2023.
Photo: Denis Ha, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Abstract art has long been concerned with the tension between perception and its effect on the viewer, but as a historical genre, it is one from which Black artists have often been excluded, despite generations of artists\u2019 work. In Canada, this marginalization is clear in art-historical legacies that trace abstraction through largely white communities of painters, whereas important Black artists such as Tim Whiten, June Clark, Jan Wade, Denyse Thomasos, and many others working in abstraction through form and content, have only recently been recognized with museum retrospectives and exhibitions. Outside of its periodization in Western modern art, abstraction has a longer and more varied history. Campbell calls his practice \u201ca liberty to own my own history,\u201d recalling the deep roots of abstraction in African art and how its appearance through the canonization of modern artists in Europe is directly tied to the period of colonization in Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Campbell\u2019s oeuvre, geometric abstraction is a defining vocabulary of expression. Jamaican-born and living and working on lek\u2019^{w<\/sup>e\u014ben territory (Victoria, British Columbia), Campbell has a wide-ranging practice that encompasses sculpture, performance, painting, and installation, as well as writing, curation, and public art. From the 2000s into the 2010s, he frequently used tessellated, symmetrical, or repeating patterns to produce paintings and prints that incorporated visual motifs related to the Jonkonnu carnival and Jamaican folk cultures of the early nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n}
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$\"Charles$
Charles Campbell<\/strong>
Jamaican Icarus<\/em>, 91,4 \u00d7 91,4 cm, 2005.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Charles$
Charles Campbell<\/strong>
Maroon Mandala<\/em>, 121,9 \u00d7 121,9 cm, 2005.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
In recent work, he has intentionally moved away from representations of the body almost entirely, to address Black diasporic histories without being tied to figural representations as expressions of identity. In works from the Maroonscape<\/em> series (2019\u201322), for example, he uses mapping and GPS data to reproduce the topographical forms of Jamaica\u2019s mountainous Cockpit Country, where the Maroons achieved freedom from the British through a series of wars and uprisings in the centuries prior to emancipation. It\u2019s a landscape with deep historical specificity, but in the gallery that terrain is transformed into sculptures that can be read in multiple ways: the birds-eye-view of aerial surveillance, but also childhood games of assembly and world-building; industrialization and containerization, but also the spore-like formations of non-human forest life. The sounds of bird calls juxtaposed with Morse-code interpretations of Octavia E. Butler\u2019s Parable of the Sower <\/em>(1993) add another evocative layer, unsettling the coded relationships between beauty and ecological and social violence. \u201cMy sculptural work is often quite opaque,\u201d Campbell writes. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t \u2018give\u2019 everything. There\u2019s a little bit of barrenness, it pulls itself away from people. I found that by using sound elements, I can spatialize this tension.\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Charles Campbell quoted in \u201cSolace * Polyphony,\u201d *Precarious Joys<\/em>, ed. Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. L\u00f3pez (Toronto: Toronto Biennial of Art and Art Metropole, 2024), 41.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n*
It is this point of spatialized tension, the shift from an indexical to an interpretive object, that imbues the work with its political dimension. Although Campbell draws upon specific sources, his works are not historical narratives, nor are they didactic: abstraction invites multiplicity. The various affective or aesthetic entry points presume different forms of encounter, rejecting the idea of a \u201cuniversal\u201d art audience and acknowledging that each viewer brings different histories and subjectivities to their encounter with the work. It\u2019s this combination of the representational and the abstract, information and opacity, that produces an engaged experience; it addresses the past somatically rather than visually and transforms what is carried in the body, for both artist and audience members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Black Studies scholar Leigh Raiford connects processes of material abstraction specifically to the work of contemporary Black artists, emphasizing the non-figurative as a site of challenge and resistance.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cTo retrain our inner eyes, we must revisit the visual structures that disciplined our sight initially. Perhaps the way to commemorate the dead and move toward a more just vision is through the genre of abstraction. \u2018Abstraction,\u2019 in its most fundamental definition, means a state of *withdrawal<\/em> from some original point.\u201d*^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Leigh Raiford, \u201cBurning All Illusion: Abstraction, Black Life, and the Unmaking of White Supremacy,\u201d Art Journal<\/em> 79, no. 4 (2020): 77\u200a\u2013\u200a91.<\/span> Raiford is drawing upon the thinking of Jamaican theorist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter, who has written that humanity\u2019s survival depends on rethinking origin stories, \u201cundoing systems of racial violence and their attendant knowledge systems,\u201d and retraining the \u201cinner eyes\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aa term Wynter uses to refer to biases that both shape perception and dehumanize.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Sylvia Wynter, \u201c\u2018No Humans Involved\u2019: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,\u201d Forum NHI: Knowledge for the 21st<\/em> Century<\/em> 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 44; quoted in Raiford, \u201cBurning All Illusion.\u201d<\/span> Raiford proposes such a retraining of perception through work that abandons figuration, analyzing how abstraction could offer a means of challenging white supremacy. She conceptualizes \u201cwithdrawal\u201d both in its visual sense\u200a\u2014\u200ato reduce or withdraw elements of a subject to reveal a core expression of form\u200a\u2014\u200aand, more radically, as a site of power that challenges white supremacy specifically in its move away from representations of the body. Thus, technology\u200a\u2014\u200aas an ordering system that contains, moves, controls, or disciplines the body\u200a\u2014\u200ais a significant source of critique, implicit in Campbell\u2019s choice to use cartography, mapping, and visualization systems to transcend the limits of knowledge into experiential form. He transforms technological data and metrics (what might be called \u201cthe visual structures that discipline sight\u201d) into complex installations in which the resolution of the work is not disconnected from its sources but departs from them, producing spaces that sit alongside, or become entangled with, the histories addressed. In contemporary art, one finds parallels in the practices of artists such as Mark Bradford, whose conceptual paintings incorporate maps, posters, timetables, or other materials that aggregate data into what he calls \u201csocial abstractions,\u201d or Julie Mehretu, whose approach to painting includes layering architectural plans, schematic renderings, and cartographic references to create works that produce a \u201ctime-based experiential dynamic, a visceral experience.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - JaBrea Patterson-West, \u201cJulie Mehretu: On Black Abstraction, Futurity and Opacity as a Space of Liberation\u201d *Flash Art<\/em>, May 17, 2021, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n*
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$\"Charles$
Charles Campbell<\/strong>
How many colours has the sea<\/em>, exhibition view, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2024.
Photo: Laura Findlay, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This method\u200a\u2014\u200athinking through withdrawal as a counter to technologies that have conditioned life\u200a\u2014\u200ais operative in what feminist theorist Tina M. Campt terms a practice of refusal, a practice that refuses to embrace a diminished subjecthood and uses \u201cnegation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power.\u201d ^{5<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 5 <\/a> - Tina M. Campt, \u201cBlack Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,\u201d Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory<\/em> 29, no. 1 (2019): 80.<\/span>She recognizes this in an emergent Black visuality enacted by artists \u201cwho create radical modalities of witnessing that refuse authoritative forms of visuality which function to refuse blackness itself.\u201d^{6<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 6 <\/a> - Campt, \u201cBlack Visuality and the Practice of Refusal,\u201d 79.<\/span> Such generative acts of refusal in the service of witnessing could well describe Campbell\u2019s ongoing work reclaiming the power of breath as a collective force. The works in his ongoing series of breath portraitsmay read as colour-field abstractions, but they are produced from the individual breathing patterns of Black community members, offering a non-figurative and non-monumental form of community portraiture and recognition. They are part of a larger project of ancestral narration, Black Breath Archive<\/em> (2022\u2013ongoing), in which Campbell leads participants through a guided meditation connecting them to known or imagined ancestors, recording their breathing during two-minute pauses between the prompts. He has conducted these sessions with friends, collaborators, and colleagues in Victoria, Vancouver, Surrey, Nanaimo, Toronto, and Montr\u00e9al, and has also had others lead the sessions, including with a Black youth group in Vancouver and with spoken word poets, Joshua (Scribe) Watkis and David Delisca, in Toronto. In reckoning with both grief and solace, the practice offers participants a connection to one\u2019s lineage, a call to the immediacy of the present moment, and a meaningful symbol of Black collective resistance. It might also be understood as a practice of withdrawal, in which a person\u2019s representational form (their voice and speech) is removed, such that a less legible form of identity (their breath) is surfaced and made public. It offers a powerful humanization of Black ancestry and legacy, in opposition to the anonymized traumas of the Middle Passage and the systemic anti-Black violence of the present day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Charles$
Charles Campbell<\/strong>
How many colours has the sea<\/em>, exhibition view, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, 2024.
Photo: Laura Findlay, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The experience of abstraction can also be deeply poetic. In the fall of 2024, curator Sarah Edo organized a live stage adaptation of Dionne Brand\u2019s *A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging <\/em>(2002), held within Campbell\u2019s installation at The Power Plant, producing a remarkable exchange between the two through performance.*^{7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 7 <\/a> - Adapted by Jaye Austin Williams, it was performed by Amaka Umeh, Courtnay McFarlane, and Patrick Teed, reciting excerpts of Brand\u2019s text as they moved within the installation.<\/span> In Brand\u2019s groundbreaking work, she writes of the door of no return as both a specific place\u200a\u2014\u200athe physical site of violent departure through which enslaved Africans were forced\u200a\u2014\u200aand an unlocatable place, a simultaneous presence and absence: \u201cCartography is description, not journey. The door, of course, is not on the continent but in the mind; not a physical place\u200a\u2014\u200athough it is\u200a\u2014\u200abut a space in the imagination.\u201d ^{8<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 8 <\/a> - Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging<\/em> (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2011), 97.<\/span> As is the ocean: a site of both metaphor and violent rupture, actual and speculative. Beneath a geometric seafloor, across the breath portraits and audience members, the performers spoke as though they were characters or friends, relatives or ancestors, reaching across time and space to recount feelings of distance, longing, or diasporas. Campbell\u2019s artworks function like this too, in the service of an experience that interrupts received ideas and narratives, particularly by developing practices, in public, for Black communities to share stories and to claim and preserve space through acts of generative refusal. Within a sophisticated form of aesthetic restraint, Campbell\u2019s work makes a demand that is somatic and experiential, allowing viewers to transform what is carried in their own bodies through multiple, undirected interpretations or critiques, while avoiding the assumption that all audiences will engage the terms of the works\u2019 sources in the same way\u200a\u2014\u200athat is the provocation of his work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Art writer, freelance editor, and curator, Jayne Wilkinson\u2019s work blends research into environmental politics and surveillance cultures, with a focus on contemporary art and photo-based practices. She writes for BlackFlash<\/em>, e-flux Criticism<\/em>, Momus<\/em>, and others. She currently serves on the board of directors at C Magazine<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ocean depths are, famously, the least-known places on Earth: devoid of light, without colour, still largely unmapped, and where all perception must occur through technological distance. Multidisciplinary artist Charles Campbell takes up this speculative space, both imagined and actual, in his recent installation How many colours has the sea<\/em> (2024). Nine large, luminous aluminum panels, tall and narrow with patterns of vibrant pink, orange, yellow, and blue, punctuate a darkened gallery like thin slices of rainbow cut from indigo walls. A reticulated metal sculpture occupies the airspace; its undulating, angular geometries unfold with a floating rhythm suggesting corals, clouds, or seaweeds. A resonant soundtrack composed of recordings produced by oceanic hydrophones evokes the hypnotic aural effects of moving water, interrupted by the occasional, unsettling sound of a large splash. These immersive contrasts create a feeling of deep reverence, calling to mind the sea as both a metaphorical figure of spirit and renewal and a specific place of mourning.<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":268465,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[7491],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[3945],"artistes":[7447],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[319],"class_list":["post-268470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-114-abstractions-en","auteurs-jayne-wilkinson-en","artistes-charles-campbell-en","type_post-principal"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268470"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":268473,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268470\/revisions\/268473"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=268470"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=268470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}