Background
Camille Turner was born in Kingston, Jamaica and immigrated to Canada when she was nine, first to Sarnia, and then to Hamilton, Ontario.
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Camille Turner
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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.
Career
Childhood/ Her childhood experience of living in Canada was marked by a feeling of otherness, with other kids" racial taunts and 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? 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." Turner"s work investigates diasporic identity and intercultural exchange through interventions, installations, 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 Mission 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. Turner was Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Missisauga, 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 storefront on Barton Street, the work presented recorded audio narratives of local residents" memories and invited visitors to share written responses.
