Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating?
September 5 - November 22, 2015
The Ottawa Art Gallery, Arts Court, 2 Daly Ave, Ottawa, ON K1N 6E2
September 5 - November 22, 2015
The Ottawa Art Gallery, Arts Court, 2 Daly Ave, Ottawa, ON K1N 6E2
What are you? Where did you come from? I think you are the cause of all this! These are some of the proclamations emanating from the interior of Jinny Yu’s large-scale, site-specific painting and sound installation Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? (2015) at the Oratorio di San Ludovico. The detectible nervousness in the voices of Alfred Hitchcock’s distraught characters from the film The Birds (1963) functions here as a trigger of fear and discomfort within the three-dimensional painting that is installed as a suspended chamber with a single entryway. The work elicits the viewer’s fear of the unknown mass by drawing a parallel to reactions popular attitudes and guarded perceptions towards migration.
The whiteness of the surrounding enclosure is broken up with hundreds of thousands of black ink brushstrokes that resemble an unfamiliar mass in movement, circling at a distance. The abstract marks cover the structure in a vortex, alluding to the threat of them swooping down, which perpetuates the sense of unease. Amid the chorus of incoherent English words and abstracted human voices emerge phrases such as “You don’t think there’s something going around, do you?” and “They’re frightening the children.” The words are remixed, layered and repeated in a rhythmic yet unpredictable sequence of utterances interrupted by eerily segmented silences suggestive of a climax: the invasion by a foreign species.
The distorted noises evoke a sense of anxiety and disorientation. And the female voices, though familiar, sound desperate and unsteady, offering little reprieve from the enclosed environment suspended in the space. The abstracted marks and collaged sounds in Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? act as a vocabulary to describe the common response of animosity and suspicion towards migrants, pointing to the social and political response at the crux of this abstract painting.
As the eyes and ears do the work to complete the narrative, the painting unequivocally enhances the discourse on migration policies while poignantly revealing the emotional and instinctual, or perhaps learned and inherited, responses towards the phenomenon of mass migration. A sense of acknowledgment and accountability is evoked by this immersive environment as our individual prejudices and core beliefs about who constitutes the Other are exposed.
Ola Wlusek, Curator of Contemporary Art, Ottawa Art Gallery
The whiteness of the surrounding enclosure is broken up with hundreds of thousands of black ink brushstrokes that resemble an unfamiliar mass in movement, circling at a distance. The abstract marks cover the structure in a vortex, alluding to the threat of them swooping down, which perpetuates the sense of unease. Amid the chorus of incoherent English words and abstracted human voices emerge phrases such as “You don’t think there’s something going around, do you?” and “They’re frightening the children.” The words are remixed, layered and repeated in a rhythmic yet unpredictable sequence of utterances interrupted by eerily segmented silences suggestive of a climax: the invasion by a foreign species.
The distorted noises evoke a sense of anxiety and disorientation. And the female voices, though familiar, sound desperate and unsteady, offering little reprieve from the enclosed environment suspended in the space. The abstracted marks and collaged sounds in Don’t They Ever Stop Migrating? act as a vocabulary to describe the common response of animosity and suspicion towards migrants, pointing to the social and political response at the crux of this abstract painting.
As the eyes and ears do the work to complete the narrative, the painting unequivocally enhances the discourse on migration policies while poignantly revealing the emotional and instinctual, or perhaps learned and inherited, responses towards the phenomenon of mass migration. A sense of acknowledgment and accountability is evoked by this immersive environment as our individual prejudices and core beliefs about who constitutes the Other are exposed.
Ola Wlusek, Curator of Contemporary Art, Ottawa Art Gallery