"To be a Black Canadian is to Live in Contradiction," says artist Camille Turner.
Her exhibit Camille Turner: Hometown Queen, showing at the Art Gallery of Hamilton until January 2027, explores that contradiction through a 30-year retrospective. The show spans her performance work as Miss Canadiana, her Afrofuturist pieces, Canada's ugly history with slavery, and her own family's story.
Turner was nine when she arrived in Canada from Jamaica, and she remembers white teachers warning her about the "teasing" she would inevitably face. Growing up in Sarnia, she recalls, "One teacher took me aside and said, 'The children are gonna tease you because you're another colour. Just tell them that sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me'. That was how they were preparing me. I just remember the very first time I'm on a playground and this big blonde boy called me the N word. It's a strange feeling." She later moved to Hamilton, where she described the racism as more brazen.
Turner's first work to touch on identity was Suit of Armour, about the psychology of growing up as a Black child in Canada. She made it in collaboration with white artist Nancy Patterson, who mentored her and helped her write grants.
It took Turner until her 40s to develop the character Miss Canadiana. She wrestled with the idea for four years before her first performance on Canada Day in 2002. "I was in North Bay, and I'm walking through this mall, and people are staring at me," Turner shares. "I felt this irony of the multicultural idea that Canada has about itself: 'We're not like the people in the States. We're different. We're this place where everybody belongs.' That's what they say, but that's totally not what I was feeling. It was the contrast between those two things, what I was living and what I was told - that was what Canada was all about. The irony made this image pop into my head of myself as a representative of Canadian heritage."
