POPULATION is a massive, traveling exhibition launched in early 2010 at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and scheduled to fill an ever-expanding calendar of national venues. POPULATION represents a numerically sizeable body of uniform-format portraits arranged en masse in an exhibit combining elements of painting, performance, conceptual art and installation. POPULATION is far from a conventional portrait show. Multi-textured and multi-layered in approach, the exhibit regales viewers with vibrantly expressionistic, interpretive portraits rendered in oil applied to glass which assume an added dimension when seen as a collective organism mounted as a group or mock “population”; a concept further extended when individual portraits are added or removed. The exhibit thus mimics real populations through fluctuations in numbers and other variations in the general mix. 

Archetypes tightens the focus by alluding to systems of classification established by anthropology and other social sciences and pseudosciences such as phrenology, which counts the bumps on one’s head as a key to character and personality traits. Archetypes considers physical attributes, such as skin pigment, bone structure, the size and shape of organs and appendages including eyes, hair, ears, nose, lips, in determining the racial or socio-cultural roots of an individual. Archetypes calls into question a vast array of both “scientific” as well as folkloric assumptions about physical traits of certain groups, and about common, controversial beliefs linked with those traits. 

Archetypes prompts the viewer to ponder the impossibility of “pure” heritage or unadulterated genealogy in ethnic strains and bloodlines. With each new portrait, Turner conjures afresh the mysteries of lineage underlying the constitution of the unique individual, revealing the elusiveness of ethnic origins, and questioning racial stereotypes and related notions concerning behavioral determinism. Archetypes poses the age-old question of whether or not all are descended from a common ancestor, and asks what happens when a black face is painted blue, a brown face is painted white, a white face is painted yellow, a red face is painted gray.