Camille Turner

Early life

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Turner immigrated to Canada when she was nine, first to Sarnia, and then Hamilton, Ontario. Her childhood experience of living in Canada was marked by a feeling of otherness; other kids' racial taunts created a sense that she didn't belong. Turner has said, "no matter how long I live in Canada, no matter that I've lived here most of my life, when will I ever be Canadian? The feeling of otherness is so common." Simultaneously, Canada was the place where she and her mother and sister became reunited with her father, a boilermaker who made his living working in Hamilton's steel industry. Turner notes, "for me, my father was always somewhere else. And so home was always this mythical place that was going to happen when he would get settled. Then he would send for us, and we would be a family together. That's why a lot of the work that I do is about belonging and home, because it has always been this thing that was out there."

Education

Turner is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, and has also attended McMaster University and Sheridan College. She earned a Master of Environmental Studies from York University, a radically interdisciplinary program which approaches environmental and social justice from many different angles. Currently, Turner is a PHD Candidate in Environmental Studies, also with York University.

Artistic career

Turner's work investigates diasporic identity and intercultural exchange through interventions, installations, performances, media works, and public engagements, and her most recent work investigates hidden or erased histories through place-based exploration. She is best known for her glamorous alter-ego Miss Canadiana, a hometown beauty queen on an ambassadorial Red, White, and Beautiful Tour, who has been calling out contradictions in the Canadian mythology of multiculturalism across the globe since 2002.

Frequently employing new media art and mobile technologies in her interactive performance projects, several of Turner's projects imagine black futures through afrofuturistic narratives. A series of performances—The Final Frontier (2010), TimeWarp (2013), and The Afronautic Research Lab (2016)—proposes the return of a group of space travelers, the Afronauts, descendants of the Dogon people of West Africa who have come home after 10,000 years to save the planet. Using the detailed iconography of [science fiction|Science fiction], Turner investigates the mythic Canadian landscape. Not letting Canadians sit comfortably with the self-satisfied narrative that their country was often at the end of the Underground Railroad, The Afronauts most recently confronted the country's amnesia around its own histories of slavery by inviting visitors to pore over ads posted in 18th-century newspapers by Canadian slave owners. Through these performances, Turner builds on stories of the Dogon's extensive astronomical knowledge dating back to 3200 BC - in regards to this research and creation, Turner has said "You know, to cavort with the ghosts is what I think about, because these things haunt the present, and sci-fi is a great language for connecting with the ghosts."

Turner was Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2012–2014. In the summer of 2015, her interactive project "Big Up Barton" focused on a neglected neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario. Mounted in a neglected store front on Barton Street, the work presented recorded audio narratives of local residents' memories and invited visitors to share written responses.