Khari Turner
1 collaboration
Khari Turner’s impressionistic paintings set their obscured Black subjects adrift in waves of memory. Water is a major source of inspiration, especially its relationship to the African American experience: recalling the transatlantic slave trade, racially segregated swimming pools of the mid-20th century and the artist’s own childhood on the shores of Lake Michigan. It is depicted stylistically through textured drips and swirls of colour, but also present physically - Turner mixes water collected from places of personal and historical significance into his pigments. The sodium levels of different water sources react with the paints, resulting in the unpredictable veins, splotches and residues that punctuate his canvases. Through both medium and subject, Turner’s paintings channel the churning chaos and gentle grace of oceans, rivers and lakes.
