Camille Turner: Hometown Queen

Camille Turner: Hometown Queen offers the first in-depth retrospective of the artist’s nearly 30-year career. Raised in Hamilton (born in Jamaica), and now living internationally, Turner has developed a formidable body of work in performance, installation, photography, video, and sculpture. Her practice powerfully addresses racial and social politics, offering a critical analysis of the enduring systems of oppression in Canada and abroad. Her works are at times very stark and poetic, while at other times she uses irony and humour to underscore the injustices of anti-Black discrimination.

Turner has written, during her many years of scholarly research and artistic production, that “Blackness has been systematically ‘disappeared’ from the Canadian nation. … I explore various mechanisms through which this disappearance has been achieved, ranging from historical omissions to social exclusion as well as literally burying evidence of Canada’s Black past….”

This exhibition traces her trajectory, from foundational works such as Hometown Queen and Miss Canadiana to recent large-scale video installations that draw on her research into Newfoundland’s ties to the transatlantic slave trade. Across 6000 square feet of media—including the interactive Afronautic Research Lab, audio walking tours, and archival documentation—the exhibition unveils her persistent conceptual and narrative threads on anti-racism.

The retrospective premieres Worthy, a new immersive multi-media installation. This work explores her father’s childhood experience of growing up on the grounds of one of Jamaica’s most profitable businesses, which emerged from what was formerly a slave plantation. Worthy illuminates the enduring impact of slavery across geographies and generations, positioned through her father’s vital voice in this living history.

Turner’s work confronts histories marked by erasure, deliberate burying, and systemic silencing, and yet she actively forges a hopeful path forward. She creates spaces of contemplation and imaginative possibility, inviting reflection on what might emerge—for herself, for her father and family, and for generations still to come.

About the Artist:

Camille Turner is an artist and scholar whose practice spans a variety of media including social practice, performance, video, photography, installation, and sculpture. Grounded in Afrofuturism and historical research, she reimagines colonial archives and confronts the entanglement of what is now Canada in the transatlantic trade of Africans, envisioning liberated futures shaped by Black knowledge, memory, and imagination.

Born in Jamaica in 1960, Turner was raised in Hamilton and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She was the Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto and completed a PhD at York University with a research-creation project closely connected to her artistic practice. In 2025, Turner was featured in the São Paulo Biennial and was Artist-in-Residence at the Fine Arts Center of University of Massachusetts Amherst in partnership with Slavery North.

Turner has held solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally and is the recipient of the 2025 Exhibition of the Year award for Otherworld (Art Museum at the University of Toronto) from Galeries Ontario / Ontario Galleries (GOG) and the 2022 Artist Prize from the Toronto Biennial of Art. Her work is held in major public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Canada Council Art Bank, Royal Bank of Canada, Museum London, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Wedge Collection, and The Rooms. She is represented in Canada by Central Art Garage.