Artists
Canada
Jesse Campbell
Flight
20.04.26 30.04.26
Jesse Campbell is a Métis, Saulteaux, and Cree artist and a registered member of the Manitoba Métis Federation. Based on the unceded lands of the Lekwungen people, he has worked as a professional mural artist since 2010 and as a full-time artist and arts facilitator since 2018. He is currently Director of Tah’lum Indigenous Artists Collective and Campbell Visual Arts.
His practice focuses on public art and installation, as well as collaborative work with First Nations artists as an arts advisor and facilitator. Guided by the principle of Wakatowin, or “working in a good way,” Campbell approaches his practice through good intentions, mutual respect, dialogue, and collaboration. His mural work reimagines urban landscapes, bringing forward stories of the land while reclaiming space for nature and the First Peoples of the territory.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Flight (Spray paint, latex paint, on stucco) depicts two distinct bird species interacting with existing murals on these walls. Each bird represents a species which travels between my homelands on the Canadian Prairies and Argentina. They are in their own way a cultural liaison which travels between continents, provinces, and cities as a bastion between communities during their annual migrations between Countries.
In my Michif culture we have protocol around how we visit the land and welcome visitors on our own. In my homeland there is a lot of political tension with my Nation trying to ratify new Treaties and assert our self governance in our homelands. This has been extremely contentious in process, In the larger global perspective, birds have undertaken massive seasonal migrations between continents for thousands of years and are continuously impacted by each nation’s policies regarding conservation, pollution, and habitat. This work examines how a birds right to its traditional lands is politicized regardless of which country it visits.
The bird species depicted include: the Swainson’s Hawk, Buteo swainsoni, a raptor species which migrates from the Canadian prairies and west of the Rockies every year to as far south as the Argentine Pampas. The Wilsons Phalarope, Phalaropus tricolour, which is a unique dabbling bird which travels between wetlands and salt lakes on the continents.
BIO
Jesse Campbell
1993 |Canada
Lives and works in Victoria, Canada
Métis/Salteaux/European
EDUCATION
2018| Camosun College: Estudios superiores en Ciencias, con orientación en Biología y Tecnología Ambiental
MURALS
2025 | Coast. Capital Regional District Housing Corporation,Victoria and Presence, Squamish Mural Festival, Squamish, British Columbia,Canada
2024 | Return, Provost, Alberta, Canada
2023 | KELÁJENEȻ, W’SANEC nation, Brentwood Bay, British Columbia, Canada; Secret Garden. Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Related Activities
Open Studio
Latitudes
Artists in dialogue
29.04.26
The three artists brought together in this Open Studio approach, through very different perspectives and languages, the experience of inhabiting a world shaped by displacement, overlapping territories, and transformation. Their works challenge the idea of both territory and the body as stable, bounded spaces, proposing instead forms of belonging that are shaped through time, memory, and experience. In this sense, neither place nor the body appears simply as a context or container in which things happen, but rather as something produced and transformed through the relationships we establish with them.
This perspective also invites us to reconsider the notion of origin. Rather than understanding it as a fixed point to which one can return, the three practices present it as a shifting condition—one that persists even as it changes. The past does not function here as a fixed image, but as an active material that continues to intervene in the present. From different cultural and geographical experiences, the artists explore forms of identity and belonging that do not depend on stable borders, but on the capacity to establish relationships across times, spaces, and experiences.
Latitudes proposes thinking about this relational space: not so much where we are, but from where—and through which layers of experience—we construct a place.
