Post #88

Jorian Charlton

When I was in Toronto, I also saw Jorian Charlton’s exhibition titled Jorian Charlton: Out of Many at the AGO. In this exhibition, she riffs on the idea of the contemporary family album, taking beautiful photos of other Jamaican-Canadian people, and juxtaposing them with a display of her own family’s photos on a wood paneled wall in the middle of the gallery space. The photos are very focused on style and self-fashioning, and with being very collaborative with the subjects of the photos and finding power in the act of documentation as “the very act of gathering, collecting and preserving photographs safeguards their value and amplifies that importance.”¹

This exhibition felt very timely for me, as I was in Toronto with my brother visiting with some family of mine. We are not blood related to each other, but they have been family friends of ours for a number of years, with my brother and I referring to them as our cousins/aunt & uncle. Despite us not being related, there are many cultural similarities between us, (Our cultural background is from Trinidad and Tobago, and theirs is Guyanese) creating a sense of family between all of us. Due to many intergenerational issues, a lot of my own family is not that close, so I was drawn to this reimagining of the family album and narrative as it was really similar to seeing how we have somewhat reimagined what family looks like for us, on this trip. Within the article “Here and Elsewhere: Nuit Blanche as a Site of Cultural Simultaneity”, Sivanesan talks about the “belonging and unbelonging that characterizes the immigrant experience”² with the definition of this belonging being “the ability of the immigrant or racialized subject to conform to the gaze of the dominant culture.”³ However, something else that I thought about while viewing these photos, is that this feeling can happen within our own respective communities. As I mentioned before, a lot of my own family is not that close and most of this is because of the ongoing intergenerational trauma that has affected us for years, much of it caused by the after effects of colonialism. Because of this, it has driven me to reimagine what family and belonging looks like for me within my own cultural needs. Charlton is so open about the individuals in her photographs – asking stylish strangers she finds on Instagram to be her subjects or just asking friends and fellow creatives,⁴ yet she ensures that they are Jamaican-Canadian in order to crystallize this identity and culture she shares with her subjects.⁵ The concept of found families will always be important, but on this trip, I saw that found family that share a cultural heritage or background is essential to feeding cultural needs you may have – whether that is food, knowing certain references or even just the comfort level you have with each other.

Charlton then goes on to juxtapose these contemporary family album images with photos from her own family to open the conversation not to the gaze of the dominant culture, but to the “wider Black community”⁶, showing that this dialogue is a cross cultural exchange. By doing this, Charlton confirms that these conversations are happening inwards, not outwards and that she is “deeply considering and validating what the racialized experience entails”⁷ and not just from a place of unbelonging, but also simultaneously, belonging.

 
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1 Object label for Clayton Charlton’s Slides by Clayton Charlton. In exhibition "Jorian Charlton: Out of Many” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON.  Seen on: May 28, 2022

2 Julie Nagam, Janine Marchessault, and Haema Sivanesan, “Here and Elsewhere: Nuit Blanche as a Site of Cultural Simultaneity,” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures (Tkaronto, Canada, ON: Public Books, 2021), pp. 235-241, 236.

3 Ibid.

4 Object label for Contemporary Family Album by Jorian Charlton. In exhibition "Jorian Charlton: Out of Many” at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON.  Seen on: May 28, 2022

5 Ibid.

6 Object label for Clayton Charlton’s Slides by Clayton Charlton.

7 “Here and Elsewhere: Nuit Blanche as a Site of Cultural Simultaneity,” in Holding Ground: Nuit Blanche and Other Ruptures, 236.

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Shaneela Boodoo