Jorian Charlton Reviewed in Maisonneuve

June 24, 2022

Out of Many: Sharine Taylor reviews photographer Jorian Charlton’s first solo exhibition

By Sharine Taylor

For many Black people, the archive can be a hostile site. As Black feminist thinker Saidiya Hartman writes in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” archives are limited in their ability to document Black life. Despite there being almost no firsthand account of Black women’s journeys through the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the untenable violence inflicted on their bodies is present in archival texts.

Tina Campt, another Black feminist thinker and a theorist of visual culture and contemporary arts, has suggested a way to approach this gap: pay attention to images. Campt’s research explores how we might listen deeply to photographs to engage with historically ignored subjects and members of the Black diaspora. Her academic work shares their stories to expand upon the ways we know and understand Black life.

Toronto-based photographer Jorian Charlton is building on this work of restoring and reimagining how Black life is portrayed. She uses the archive as a springboard into conversations about the act of remembering, diasporic identity, reframing immigration and Black subjectivity.

The story of Charlton’s latest series begins with her father. In 2017, Clayton Charlton nonchalantly handed his daughter a collection of 35mm slides that he had taken between the late 1970s and 1980s. Though he didn’t consider himself a photographer, he’d spent a great deal of his time chronicling his family’s life in Jamaica, New York and Toronto. He photographed them socializing and relaxing, the interiors of their homes and the details of their neighbourhoods. The images are joyous and full of life—people dance in living rooms, cut coconuts in lush fields of green grass and laugh over cold beers on the beach.

After tucking her father’s slides away for safekeeping, Charlton found them a few years later while cleaning out storage. She decided to engage with them in her own practice. Using her father’s images as a frame of reference, Charlton invited her friends and peers to join her in creating an intimate series of portraits inspired by the family album.

In 2021, she launched her digital exhibit Out of Many, which displayed her own photographs exploring Black aesthetics and Jamaican-Canadian identity alongside her father’s slides. She showcased her father’s images by hanging some of them on the walls of a virtual living room and projecting others on a TV in the same space. The digital room is a replica of the insides of many Caribbean homes, with a sound system and vinyls of classic reggae albums, a couch covered in plastic and doilies lining the furniture.

Following the success of the online exhibition, Out of Many has been recreated in person at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and is on display until August 2022. Both the virtual and physical exhibitions of Out of Many make a personal history public through the act of remembering. Family albums are home to intimate visual histories and stories of the people with whom we share, and have shared, kinship. Charlton’s work redefines the contemporary family by using close friends and acquaintances as its subjects, and reminds us of the comfort and community that family bonds can provide us.

While there are no explicit indicators of the precise relationships between her subjects, her photographs tell a more textured story of the expansiveness of family—whether it’s defined as a chosen group of people, a blood connection, or a bond formed through geographical proximity.

For Black families, the album makes up for what the archive, as we know it, lacks. It is an opportunity to chronicle Black life with care so that remembering becomes an intentional process. The subjects in Charlton’s exhibit stare into the lens with a clear awareness of how they appear in the images being made. The Black family unit, in all of its varied forms, positions itself as deserving to be documented and remembered in whatever manner its members see fit.

[…]

To view the full article visit Maisonneuve

For more information about Jorian Charlton please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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