Portals Through Time: Jorian Charlton's Portraiture and a New Black Canadian Visual Culture
In her text In the presence of absence: Invisibility, black Canadian history, and Melinda Mollineaux’s pinhole photography, theorist Andrea Fatona quotes Canadian author Rinaldo Walcott, saying “multicultural policies…are posited on a fictitious notion that the presence of Black people in Canada is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to post-World War II” (Fatona, 228). Embedded in this fiction of absence from history is the removal of self-determination through visual culture. What, and who is represented in visual culture is an authority that belongs to the dominant colonial power. Through photography, among other mediums, Black artists are disrupting these dominant notions of who produces visual culture in Canada by reinforcing the existence of Black Canadians in the past and present. In doing so, new aesthetic sensibilities are taking form: ones that make visible the transience of Black Canadian identity across generations and borders, that exemplify the heterogeneity of Blackness, that celebrate Black joy and love in a time when Black trauma and death are centred most often, and that prioritize self-determination within representation.
In general, Black artists are using aesthetic strategies to “communicate Black Canadian collective experiences of belonging to, and being alienated from, the Canadian nation” (Fatona 229). Through her exhibition Out of Many, Jorian Charlton takes up questions of presence, immigration, and the construction of identity within the political sphere of Canada. What does it mean to be a Black Canadian? Who determines what and who is presented within Canadian visual culture? These questions are explored by Charlton in her exhibition which exists in an online form and physical form at the Art Gallery of Ontario from December 18th, 2021 to August 7th, 2022. Jorian Charlton's stylized portrait photography is placed in conversation with her father’s photography collection from the late 70s and 80s, which were gifted to her for safekeeping. Across generations and borders, this exhibit tracks the fluidity of immigration and her lineage from Jamaica, Toronto, and New York, creating “a tangible archive of what was, what is, and what will become––one, out of many” (Croning 2021).
Upon entering the exhibit, the viewer is presented with a broad wall in the colours of the Jamaican flag, introducing the show and artist. The exhibit is built around this wall and the two that sit perpendicular to each of its ends, forming a U shape which is visible only once the viewer has travelled around to the other side of the gallery space. Throughout the space, prints are hung at eye and hip level, in small and larger-than-life print sizes, creating an increased sense of the difference between prints. Using the stylized format of fashion photography, Charlton is reinscribing the Black body, in its myriad forms, into Canadian visual culture. However, simply placing Black bodies into the canon of current visual culture does not undo its construction. Instead, Black artists must work to deconstruct the narrative of a nation by questioning its legitimacy and foundation (Fatona 229). To do so, Charlton pushes back against a homogenized understanding of Black identity by celebrating the heterogeneity of Blackness and centring black joy, black care, and black love, in a time when most people are being exposed only to black trauma. Several subjects are photographed in Charlton’s portraits, of many ages and ethnicities. Her varying location, subject, and theme within her portraiture reflects the sheer immeasurability of different locations that exist within the moniker of “Black”. She is not only questioning the validity of the tradition of visual culture within Canada, but she is actively dismantling the representation of Black bodies within contemporary media. By documenting her subjects in warm embraces, playing, and laughing, she re-imagines an aesthetic of representation that seeks to make visible the nuances of Black Canadian identity as they re-emerge out of systems of oppression.
Not only does Charlton question the canon of visual culture by imagining a new visual literacy that makes visible the many locations which intersect within Black bodies, but by placing her photographs in conversation with her father’s, Charlton’s exhibit also tracks a history of vernacular imagery. In doing so, Charlton lifts her father’s pictures from their stasis in time, allowing them to cross temporal boundaries and enter into a state of simultaneous existence then and now, and perhaps at no time at all. She opens a temporal door, allowing an intergenerational conversation to take place. In opening this portal through time, the context of the original images and their contemporary exhibition are in communication. This allows Charlton’s pictures, as well as her father’s, to expose the transience and relationality inherent to Canadian, Black, and other identities by drawing lines between the US, the Caribbean, and Canada. Across borders and time, these works “radically depart from notions of purity of culture and self and are open to engaging with new cultural differences” (Fatona 229).
In conclusion, Jorian Charlton’s exhibition Out of Many questions the canon of Canadian visual culture and imagines a new Black aesthetic of cultural production. By highlighting her subject’s individuality as well as their commonalities, she exposes the simplistic representation of Black bodies within media and proposes new sensibilities that celebrate our differences while showing how they can serve to connect communities. Furthermore, her placement of her father’s works within the centre of her exhibition creates a portal through time and geographic location. This portal opens a space for conversation which is informed by past and present contexts through a process of transculturation, and “gestures to locations and histories in the metropole and at the periphery” (Fatona 229). Finally, Charlton’s insistence on documenting her subjects within their own spaces, in their own clothes, and without instruction serves to present the viewer with images that exude the identities and desires of each subject. In all of these ways, Charlton re-imagines the process of photography as one of co-creation, rather than observation, allowing Out of Many to serve as an example of the future of Canadian visual culture, one which prioritizes self-determination and self-representation.