Camille Turner at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
By Stephanie Vegh
Camille Turner, Hometown Queen from the series Hometown Queen, 2012, pigment inkjet prints (courtesy: Art Gallery of Hamilton)
The public face of Hometown Queen at the Art Gallery of Hamilton leans joyously into the glamour of Camille Turner’s Miss Canadiana alter-ego in both its title and leading galleries. A life-size cut-out figure and photographs of a radiant beauty queen posing against Hamilton smokestacks gaze approvingly on displays filled with kitsch souvenirs of small-town appearances that position Turner as a Hamilton heroine honoured for her humour and community-centric warmth. In one vitrine, a small plastic bottle of an unknown viscous substance labeled “stop being from away bath gel” goes on to proclaim itself “as exotic as you are!” Here, the winning smile of Miss Canadiana shows its teeth, and opens the door to far more harrowing truths waiting to be told.
Camille Turner, Afronautic Research Lab, 2016-ongoing, installation view (photo: Joseph Hartman)
From carefully crafted audio tours to immersive videos arising from site-specific research, Turner has unflinchingly centered the facts of Black Canadian history. As a scholar and historian, her studies are transparently transformed into compelling experiences including Afronautic Research Lab (2016-ongoing), an effort carried forward collaboratively with siblings Karen and Lee Turner. This project manifests at the AGH as a communal table heaped with books, laminated copies of primary sources, and notebooks. Sparingly lit with red and blue lamps, visitors rely on the small flashlights provided to read this evidence of Canada’s culpability in the practice of slavery, and to provide their own responses via sticky notes left behind – handwritten notes marked by anger, disgust, and shame.
This darkened environment speaks to the significant effort required to lift these stories to visibility, while offering a tender shelter for their subjects that is mirrored in the gentle elevation of Atlantic driftwood and rope as witnesses and bodies alike in Sticks and Bones. These contemplative works are a preface of sorts to Portals, a breathtaking photographic monument to Black ancestors memorialized and cast into a speculative future through images framed in arched windows – save for one in which the overhead view of a ship’s hold closely mimics that elegant form but punches the viewer with an array of supine Black bodies stacked viciously close within.
Camille Turner, Hometown Queen, 2026, installation view (photo: Joesph Hartman)
Nave furthers Turner’s exploration of sacred architecture as the artist, in the white robes of a future time traveler, explores a church in Newfoundland near the site where ships were built for the late 18th Century slave trade, and where Newfoundland stone was loaded as ballast into ships bound for Africa, only to be exchanged for the awful weight of human cargo. As Turner’s camera inverts the ribbed vault of the church to a soundtrack of creaking wood, the likeness between ship and church becomes inescapable.
Against these dark visions of the past, Turner invites the starlight of the future. From Nave collaborator Emilie Jabouin’s defiant dance on the Atlantic shore to the golden beauty of four figures taking fantastic flight in Fly, the grace and empathy that has defined Camille Turner’s storytelling over decades of artistic creation and collaboration is fully realized here in a powerful retrospective that rightly crowns Turner in all her regal strength.
Camille Turner: Hometown Queen continues until January 3.
Art Gallery of Hamilton: https://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/
Then gallery is accessible.
Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based artist, writer, and arts worker focused on communications and advocacy. Her drawings, installations, and book-based works investigate cyclical histories and human impacts on the natural world. She can be followed on Instagram @stephanievegh