I Notice a Sound That’s Out of Place

Priscilla Yin Barker, Hayley Chiu, Tong Zhou Lafrance, Katia Lo Innes, Serene Yi-Shuan Mitchell, Tizzi Tan, Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu

Curated by Emerald Repard-Denniston

September 6 - October 6, 2024

To view the exhibition’s Zine please click here.

I Notice a Sound That’s Out of Place: silence on a busy street; rumbling thunder in January; birds chirping in the dead of night.

Over the past two years, eight artists based in Canada—Priscilla Yin Barker, Hayley Chiu, Tong Zhou Lafrance, Katia Lo Innes, Serene Yi-Shuan Mitchell, Tizzi Tan, Jasmine Yangqingqing Yu and Emerald Repard-Denniston —all happened to travel back to Asia. While some artists visited mainland China, others visited Hong Kong and Taiwan. Each territory is fraught with complex histories of migration and imperialism, and thus is called ‘home’ by billions in overlapping diasporas. An uncanny rift opens between memory and home. While investigating this dwelling, we find a dirty mirror, a ghost lingering in a family album; a decaying facade, an ink stain oozing across memory. A woman’s face stares back at us, cool and detached, full of rage and longing. The mirror falls. And then, a shatter.

This multimedia exhibition challenges and reinterprets the concept of a “homecoming.” Artists grapple with contradictory emotions and fluid representations of Asianness and Asia as a material space. Physical and metaphorical boundaries are called into question in each artist’s journey toward reconciliation. By incorporating archival materials, photo weavings, still-life, dioramas, architectural molds, and experimental film, this exhibit seeks to understand these rituals of return.