Ретроспектива Камиллы Тернер в Галерее искусств Хэмптона исследует наследие рабства и расизма

Born in Jamaica and raised in Hamilton, Camille Turner is Hamilton’s “Hometown Queen.” Living in America now, her work occupies 6,000 square feet of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, a 30-year retrospective of her creativity. It’s a legacy that draws on almost every medium — photography, video, writing, sculpture and performance — and a legacy that confronts core elements of western society, racism and its slavery roots. “Miss Canadiana,” the “Afronautic Research Lab” and her new work, “Worthy,” swirls through the past, Canada’s and her own. Her retrospective is a full-circle moment, a closing of a cycle that contains many and continues to produce more. “I am interrogating the fabric of the reality that I’m living in,” said Turner, 66. “There’s so much of it that’s hidden, that’s overwritten, that’s silenced, that’s told that it doesn’t exist and yet, as a Black person, I am living in it and I’m feeling this … When you look at the world as it is, it feels incomparable unless you know what produced it.” Remerging in the retrospective is the concept of “Miss Canadiana,” the persona that launched her artistic career in the early 2000s. Spending her childhood and young adult years growing up in Hamilton, Turner’s father worked as a boilermaker. As she spent years in Stoney Creek in the ’70s, she describes racism as “open” but paradoxically, people saw her in Hamilton in a way she never felt seen when she moved to Toronto as an assistant director at the YMCA in the ’80s. When she went back to school at OCA (now OCAD), then launched the performance and as part of her Hometown Queen series, it featured the same factories that her father worked at. A love letter to Hamilton, “Miss Canadiana” was a pointed contradiction to Canadian racial mythology. “It’s a complicated history because Hamilton made me who I am. It’s a place that made me. It made me a person who always looks under the hood. ‘Miss Canadiana’ probably would never have happened if I hadn’t lived in Hamilton. “To come out of that environment, It’s where I sharpened my awareness.” The latest cycle was just completed with “Worthy.” Using film, photos and voice-overs, the exhibit explores her father’s childhood experience of growing up on the grounds of one of Jamaica’s most prestigious businesses. Moving from Jamaica to Canada in 1969, Turner’s father was a storyteller about his life on the island, and she’d always heard the stories about Worthy Park but rarely really listened. When she discovered a book called “Searching for the Invisible Man” in an airport bookstore in Jamaica, there was a flashbulb moment when speaking to her mentor — Worthy Park was a slave plantation before its current iteration. “I started really listening to my dad, listening with both ears and I started hearing the stories, especially the one where, when he was nine years old. Basically the estate evicted everyone who was living there,” said Turner. “After slavery ended, the people who had been formerly enslaved there had to rent the land. They weren’t allowed to buy it … and then one day (the estate) just decided, ‘out, everybody out.’” After years of research, looking at Canada’s history, Turner launched the “Afronautic Research Lab” in 2016 with her siblings. While teaching at the University of Toronto, in her class she challenged students to find evidence of Canadian slavery. Visitors can sit at a desk covered in materials on slavery, KKK marches, Birth of a Nation, and local Black histories at the AGH today. Research for her projects had brought her to Newfoundland, analyzing slave trade ships and to Senegal to the “Door of No Return,” but the Jamaican plantation was her own personal stake in the history reflected in her art. So, Turner and her father made the trip back to Jamaica in 2025. With her 90-year-old father as a guide through childhood fields he never thought he’d see again, he mentioned his ancestor “Mother Betsy,” who was alive when slavery was abolished. “The burial ground where enslaved people were buried, they always knew where they were, even though the white plantation owners had already covered them over, plowed them and made them into fields for growing cane,” said Turner. “This was really burned into my head, this image of them leaving. But also it made me so aware of my proximity to that history, that same history that I’ve been researching for the last decade and or more.” Although uncanny, Turner is aware of the cyclical nature of her work. There is always a return, Hamilton, Jamaica and even Senegal. Turner’s afronauts grew out of the same research journey that featured the Door of No Return. Although an analysis of the past, the lab is futuristic in presentation allowing her to gather more information than she would thinking in the moment. “I think about time as nonlinear … If I think from the future, I can see different things. I can see the world in a different way. I think about silence not as absence but as information,” said Turner. “For me, this whole exhibition, it marks a journey, it’s a journey that’s coming back as well, so that’s really special.” Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. 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