Julian Yi-Zhong Hou\u2019s Psychic Objects<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nJulian Yi-Zhong Hou\u2019s work pursues mystical subjects, inviting audiences to reassess consciousness through access to divination rituals, tarot, poetry, and resonant energies. Truly a conductor of magic objects, he works across many media, incorporating graphic design, philosophy, and various references drawn from Chinese cultural practices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nFor his first large-scale public commission, Crossroads<\/em> (2021), Hou created a triptych of stained-glass works installed on the ground floor of an otherwise nondescript condo development in Burnaby, BC. Stained glass traditionally relies on symbolic forms, often to the point of abstraction. As they have little depth and so much surface, the bright colours and thick lines form a geometric plane in which humans, animals, plants, and decorative shapes can mix. In Crossroads<\/em>, the crowded imagery encompasses crows, lotuses, daffodils, blooming flowers, and birds in flight, all spiralling around central figures in patterned jeans and bucket hats. With nods to Art Deco and 1960s psychedelia, the work embeds symbols of the natural world with the recognizable (and once again fashionable) aesthetics of 1990s style.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStained glass is not subtle. Its bold, contrasting shapes soldered in place delimit each small frame or image as a discrete entity. As a medium, it calls to mind the spiritual architecture of cathedrals and churches, where religious stories are narrated through patches of coloured light. Instead, Hou deals in the secular space of the mall (through a visual reference to Lougheed Town Centre) and narrates a scene of allusion, combining commerce and capital with the perceived utopias of nature. Here, the crow is striking, hiding in some scenes, soaring in others. Crows are divinatory birds, familiar to the creation myths and folklore of many cultures. They can be read as creators, omens, demons, foretellers of the future, or a reference to transformation. Like doves, crows have long held mysterious and symbolic relations with humans, inserting themselves as portents of a different kind of knowledge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n![\"Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_Crossroads_detail\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_Crossroads_04_CMYK_lr.jpg\")
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou<\/strong>
Crossroads<\/em>, installation view (detail),
4488 Juneau Street, Burnaby, 2021.
Photo : Dennis Ha, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nHou\u2019s background in architecture has no doubt influenced his interest in public art, but it\u2019s with smaller glass works that he brings viewers more intimately into his unique symbology. For his recent exhibition, Country Balance <\/em>(2021) at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto), and installation at Artpace (San Antonio), soldered works made of Tiffany-style glass, mirrors, jade, and quartz draw from a mix of Chinese traditions and pop culture aesthetics: coins, pentacles, hippie daisies, kissing doves, the tree of life, dice, owls, mantises, and Pizza Hut\u2019s logo. Some are titled to obviate their references\u200a\u2014\u200aI. Coin <\/em>(2021), VI.<\/em> Mantis<\/em> (2021)\u200a\u2014\u200awhereas others are purposefully obscure. In both installations, the works are strung up like oversized necklaces, or talismans, with hanging hardware that balances delicacy with strength. The range of symbols requires deciphering, each figure a code that can be widely interpreted. I think of them as meditations, a way to find distraction in form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_CountryBalance\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_CountryBalance2_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou<\/strong>
Country Balance<\/em>, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, 2021. <\/em>
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_VI.Mantis\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Julian-Yi-Zhong-Hou_VI.Mantis_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
Julian Yi-Zhong Hou<\/strong>
VI. Mantis<\/em>, 2021.
Photo : LF Documentation,
courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nOne of Hou\u2019s recurring symbols is the spiral. He tells a story of coming across a broken glass table that had been dumped down a hill deep in the forest, and the shattered surface formed an elegant, radial shape. Its resonance as a sign has found its way into a number of works since. As shape and symbol, a spiral is evocative. It encompasses the vastness of a universe or the tiny double helix of a DNA strand; it is whirlpools churning, plants unfurling, hurricanes moving. Spirals appear in monuments and petroglyphs and have been used and reused by artists for millennia to focus attention, to hypnotize, to transcend. In Hou\u2019s work, this recognizable form permits a reading that is both calming and energetic, allowing the eye to trace a path that moves infinitely inward or infinitely outward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Another frequent figure is the deck of cards. Hou often uses a fanned-out set of tarot cards as a repeating shape in sculptures and wallpaper works, and he has started incorporating hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds into new projects. His research into the history of cartomancy and the overlap between game-playing decks, tarot decks, and psychic readings is revelatory. As meditative practices, playing card games and pulling tarot cards offer the opportunity to resist time, to take a break from work, to focus one\u2019s intentions. These rituals are not so far apart; each traffics in a set of symbols that articulate rules and boundaries meant to be transgressed. We then attach our own meanings to the standard suits and characters, the cups and wands, the numbers and colours, whether to aid in gambling, predict the future, or heal a psychic wound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\nAttending to imagery with such charged significance means addressing artworks as functional psychic objects, as things upon which one might cast thoughts, desires, fears about past or future events simultaneously.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAs an artist, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou is a kind of medium, offering tarot readings for visitors to the exhibitions or leading ritual performances in the gallery. One needn\u2019t be a spiritual person to recognize that this work has a capacity for connecting to realms beyond the here and now, and that using a mix of art and symbology enables a space where the finitude of life feels less certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Zadie Xa\u2019s Animal Messengers<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nWorking in performance, video, painting, and textiles, Zadie Xa has built a highly original visual vocabulary of symbols and icons drawn from pop culture, theory, religious traditions, music, dance, and the ecologies of non-human worlds. Her practice addresses identity and self-representation through recourse to Korean myths, familial legacies, and matrilineal folklore. With a host of approaches to symbolism, she summons a broad audience. Past works have borrowed heavily from 1990s pop culture\u200a\u2014\u200amood rings, yin-yang symbols, patchwork eyes, fluorescent purples and turquoises, black lights\u200a\u2014\u200ato create vibrant spaces of encounter. Her recent suite of collaborative projects pushes further into this symbolic universe, narrating ecologies through repeating symbols of animal and plant life that stretch our ability to consider non-human space-time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On October 29, 2021, Xa and artist Benito Mayor Vallejo presented Scorpion<\/em> at the National Gallery, London. Commissioned by curator Priyesh Mistry as part of Dance to the Music of Our Time: A Live Exhibition<\/em>, this performance-installation is one of her most overtly symbolist works. The scene is set by a large structure with detailed, surrealist-inspired paintings on each side. One shows a group of eight gigantic women dancing between mountains and across the sea, under a red moon and a night sky green with aurora borealis. In the other, seagull, fox, scorpion, and human share a maze-like scene with trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> floor tiles\u200a\u2014\u200aan ambiguous space that nods to Magritte and De Chirico in its dream-like mix of environments. The performance begins with sound\u200a\u2014\u200aa slowly growing chorus of animal voices\u200a\u2014\u200aand from within the structure the two protagonists, Seagull and Fox, expertly performed by Yumino Seki and Jia-Yu Corti, respectively, reveal themselves. (Xa has collaborated frequently with Seki and Corti, and they each performed in Grandmother Mago<\/em> at the 2019 Venice Biennale.) The two are an oddly entangled pair. The goofiness of the seagull, with her overly dramatic exaltations of laughter and tears, and the mysterious nature of the fox, whose expressions and movements are captivating, even vulgar, produce a magnetic opposition. Set to a chaotic, mercurial soundscape of squalls, noises, and drumbeats, the performers become messengers, conveying without language a dramatic mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em> of birth and death and rebirth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Zadie-Xa_Scorpion\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Zadie-Xa_Scorpion_17_lr.jpg\")
Zadie Xa & Benito Mayor Vallejo<\/strong>
Scorpion<\/em>, installation view, The National Gallery, London, 2021.
Photo : Andrew Bruce, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nThe performance\u2019s namesake, the scorpion, is absent as a character but present in meaning. Scorpions are ancient creatures, known to have lived up to four hundred million years ago, and are today the land-based descendants of marine animals. They are often thought to represent the capacity to survive transformation, as they experience death and renewal through the most fundamental of changes. In the performance, these ideas about the scorpion are present in the shape-shifting between land, water, and air, embodying the archetypal trickster through the characters of Fox and Seagull, whose representations are based on the common seagull and urban fox, as well as various myths of the nine-tailed fox spirit (who is known as Gumiho in Korea, Huli Jing in China, Kitsune in Japan).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
This attention to transformation is a political gesture as much as a spiritual one. As Xa notes, the trickster appears when society needs upheaval or overturning; they make themselves known when change is necessary. By hosting Scorpion<\/em> in the National Gallery\u2019s famed Spanish Gallery, with Velazquez and the paintings of the Spanish Golden Age and all the colonial weight of European art history surrounding it, Xa and Vallejo interrupt art\u2019s unrelenting relationship with wealth and accumulation. Velazquez was painting at the height of Spain\u2019s expansion across the Americas; although his works are rightly celebrated as masterpieces, they provide a dark historical backdrop for the creaturely evocations of Scorpion<\/em>. What are the possibilities for change, for transformation, and for political action in the violent wake of colonization? The history of human exploitation and the associations with conquest form an outer layer for these creatures who live in other worlds, persisting, surviving, and resisting the dominance of human knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Zadie-Xa_Scorpion\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Zadie-Xa_Scorpion_51.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Zadie-Xa_Scorpion_40.jpg\")
Zadie Xa & Benito Mayor Vallejo<\/strong>
Scorpion<\/em>, performance views,
The National Gallery, London, 2021.
Photos : Andrew Bruce, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nSound plays a significant role in all Xa\u2019s performances and installations. She works with sound intuitively, like a painter would, mapping out rhythms and swells and orchestrating sound through collage techniques. Her works are theatrical in effect but sincere in intention, particularly when the voices of birds and animals mix with those of human guides. Moon Poetics for Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers<\/em> (2020) is a six-part narrative sound work produced for Somerset House Studios\u2019 online residency \u201cAssembly: Sonic Terrains\u201d and it became the main sound work for recent solo exhibitions at Remai Modern (Saskatoon) and Leeds Art Gallery. Based loosely on a Korean shamanic narrative, the work tells stories of survival on a planet in decline and suggests possibilities of resilience through a host of creatures. The voiceover, provided by Samantha Lawson, directs you to close your eyes, to meditate, to breathe, to float, to become part of an atmospheric watery realm where coexistence with animal kin seems possible. It is a work of lucid dreaming; listening engages something untethered from the physical world. \u201cBehind the arc of disaster, it\u2019s possible for a new world to emerge\u2026 there are a million paths into the future,\u201d incants the narrator. If you can release skepticism (a difficult but urgent task for our fraught present), it\u2019s possible that such a work offers not only a sonic representation of animal life but also an experience of it. Become a dangerous daydreamer, it says, become ready for the spirit of a different consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSymbolism is usually associated with visual iconography, but sonic symbolism can also be a powerful aesthetic form, as voices, calls, rhythms, or tonalities produce interpretations beyond language. In Moon Poetics\u2026<\/em>, many of Xa\u2019s familiar figures are present in their sonic forms\u200a\u2014\u200aorca, seagull, fox, conch shell, and cabbage along with mountain, ocean, moon, fish and many others. Tuning in to the communicative capacities of animals bridges the divide that language produces. Or, at least, it can help us approach the limits of human senses and encourage ways of thinking beyond them. Animal stories figure prominently in many cultural myths because they reframe human concerns in ways that are approachable and broadly relatable. In treading into this creaturely world, Zadie Xa orchestrates narratives that connect humans with non-human kin, addressing the real and ever-present threats of environmental disaster, but without the local specificity that precludes shared experience. Her animal messengers are a reminder that sentient beings exist and survive all around us. Art becomes a way for us to attune ourselves to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Zadie-Xa_MoonPoetic\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Wilkinson_Zadie-Xa_MoonPoetic-scaled.jpg\")
Zadie Xa <\/strong>
Moon Poetics for Courageous
Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers, <\/em>2020.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nSymbolism isn\u2019t a genre per se, and it\u2019s difficult to pinpoint a historical lineage because the boundaries are so broad. A symbol is a search for meaning behind the logic of the present, a way to access what is unknowable, beyond consciousness. Symbolism and ritual have become a frequent part of contemporary art practices as we live through a time of grief, reckoning with mass species extinction, pandemics, an increasingly unliveable planet, war and conflict. We need things to hold onto. Artists give us tools to communicate beyond language, to feel infinite or tiny, to imagine other realms and other worlds, to consider ancestors and futures and desires and dreams, to let our minds become truly expansive in thought. A shift in social consciousness is profoundly necessary and, although art can\u2019t necessarily produce that on its own, it can offer a reorientation, if briefly.<\/p>\n
For his first large-scale public commission, Crossroads<\/em> (2021), Hou created a triptych of stained-glass works installed on the ground floor of an otherwise nondescript condo development in Burnaby, BC. Stained glass traditionally relies on symbolic forms, often to the point of abstraction. As they have little depth and so much surface, the bright colours and thick lines form a geometric plane in which humans, animals, plants, and decorative shapes can mix. In Crossroads<\/em>, the crowded imagery encompasses crows, lotuses, daffodils, blooming flowers, and birds in flight, all spiralling around central figures in patterned jeans and bucket hats. With nods to Art Deco and 1960s psychedelia, the work embeds symbols of the natural world with the recognizable (and once again fashionable) aesthetics of 1990s style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stained glass is not subtle. Its bold, contrasting shapes soldered in place delimit each small frame or image as a discrete entity. As a medium, it calls to mind the spiritual architecture of cathedrals and churches, where religious stories are narrated through patches of coloured light. Instead, Hou deals in the secular space of the mall (through a visual reference to Lougheed Town Centre) and narrates a scene of allusion, combining commerce and capital with the perceived utopias of nature. Here, the crow is striking, hiding in some scenes, soaring in others. Crows are divinatory birds, familiar to the creation myths and folklore of many cultures. They can be read as creators, omens, demons, foretellers of the future, or a reference to transformation. Like doves, crows have long held mysterious and symbolic relations with humans, inserting themselves as portents of a different kind of knowledge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Hou\u2019s background in architecture has no doubt influenced his interest in public art, but it\u2019s with smaller glass works that he brings viewers more intimately into his unique symbology. For his recent exhibition, Country Balance <\/em>(2021) at Zalucky Contemporary (Toronto), and installation at Artpace (San Antonio), soldered works made of Tiffany-style glass, mirrors, jade, and quartz draw from a mix of Chinese traditions and pop culture aesthetics: coins, pentacles, hippie daisies, kissing doves, the tree of life, dice, owls, mantises, and Pizza Hut\u2019s logo. Some are titled to obviate their references\u200a\u2014\u200aI. Coin <\/em>(2021), VI.<\/em> Mantis<\/em> (2021)\u200a\u2014\u200awhereas others are purposefully obscure. In both installations, the works are strung up like oversized necklaces, or talismans, with hanging hardware that balances delicacy with strength. The range of symbols requires deciphering, each figure a code that can be widely interpreted. I think of them as meditations, a way to find distraction in form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of Hou\u2019s recurring symbols is the spiral. He tells a story of coming across a broken glass table that had been dumped down a hill deep in the forest, and the shattered surface formed an elegant, radial shape. Its resonance as a sign has found its way into a number of works since. As shape and symbol, a spiral is evocative. It encompasses the vastness of a universe or the tiny double helix of a DNA strand; it is whirlpools churning, plants unfurling, hurricanes moving. Spirals appear in monuments and petroglyphs and have been used and reused by artists for millennia to focus attention, to hypnotize, to transcend. In Hou\u2019s work, this recognizable form permits a reading that is both calming and energetic, allowing the eye to trace a path that moves infinitely inward or infinitely outward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another frequent figure is the deck of cards. Hou often uses a fanned-out set of tarot cards as a repeating shape in sculptures and wallpaper works, and he has started incorporating hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds into new projects. His research into the history of cartomancy and the overlap between game-playing decks, tarot decks, and psychic readings is revelatory. As meditative practices, playing card games and pulling tarot cards offer the opportunity to resist time, to take a break from work, to focus one\u2019s intentions. These rituals are not so far apart; each traffics in a set of symbols that articulate rules and boundaries meant to be transgressed. We then attach our own meanings to the standard suits and characters, the cups and wands, the numbers and colours, whether to aid in gambling, predict the future, or heal a psychic wound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attending to imagery with such charged significance means addressing artworks as functional psychic objects, as things upon which one might cast thoughts, desires, fears about past or future events simultaneously.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n As an artist, Julian Yi-Zhong Hou is a kind of medium, offering tarot readings for visitors to the exhibitions or leading ritual performances in the gallery. One needn\u2019t be a spiritual person to recognize that this work has a capacity for connecting to realms beyond the here and now, and that using a mix of art and symbology enables a space where the finitude of life feels less certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Working in performance, video, painting, and textiles, Zadie Xa has built a highly original visual vocabulary of symbols and icons drawn from pop culture, theory, religious traditions, music, dance, and the ecologies of non-human worlds. Her practice addresses identity and self-representation through recourse to Korean myths, familial legacies, and matrilineal folklore. With a host of approaches to symbolism, she summons a broad audience. Past works have borrowed heavily from 1990s pop culture\u200a\u2014\u200amood rings, yin-yang symbols, patchwork eyes, fluorescent purples and turquoises, black lights\u200a\u2014\u200ato create vibrant spaces of encounter. Her recent suite of collaborative projects pushes further into this symbolic universe, narrating ecologies through repeating symbols of animal and plant life that stretch our ability to consider non-human space-time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On October 29, 2021, Xa and artist Benito Mayor Vallejo presented Scorpion<\/em> at the National Gallery, London. Commissioned by curator Priyesh Mistry as part of Dance to the Music of Our Time: A Live Exhibition<\/em>, this performance-installation is one of her most overtly symbolist works. The scene is set by a large structure with detailed, surrealist-inspired paintings on each side. One shows a group of eight gigantic women dancing between mountains and across the sea, under a red moon and a night sky green with aurora borealis. In the other, seagull, fox, scorpion, and human share a maze-like scene with trompe l\u2019oeil<\/em> floor tiles\u200a\u2014\u200aan ambiguous space that nods to Magritte and De Chirico in its dream-like mix of environments. The performance begins with sound\u200a\u2014\u200aa slowly growing chorus of animal voices\u200a\u2014\u200aand from within the structure the two protagonists, Seagull and Fox, expertly performed by Yumino Seki and Jia-Yu Corti, respectively, reveal themselves. (Xa has collaborated frequently with Seki and Corti, and they each performed in Grandmother Mago<\/em> at the 2019 Venice Biennale.) The two are an oddly entangled pair. The goofiness of the seagull, with her overly dramatic exaltations of laughter and tears, and the mysterious nature of the fox, whose expressions and movements are captivating, even vulgar, produce a magnetic opposition. Set to a chaotic, mercurial soundscape of squalls, noises, and drumbeats, the performers become messengers, conveying without language a dramatic mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em> of birth and death and rebirth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The performance\u2019s namesake, the scorpion, is absent as a character but present in meaning. Scorpions are ancient creatures, known to have lived up to four hundred million years ago, and are today the land-based descendants of marine animals. They are often thought to represent the capacity to survive transformation, as they experience death and renewal through the most fundamental of changes. In the performance, these ideas about the scorpion are present in the shape-shifting between land, water, and air, embodying the archetypal trickster through the characters of Fox and Seagull, whose representations are based on the common seagull and urban fox, as well as various myths of the nine-tailed fox spirit (who is known as Gumiho in Korea, Huli Jing in China, Kitsune in Japan).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n This attention to transformation is a political gesture as much as a spiritual one. As Xa notes, the trickster appears when society needs upheaval or overturning; they make themselves known when change is necessary. By hosting Scorpion<\/em> in the National Gallery\u2019s famed Spanish Gallery, with Velazquez and the paintings of the Spanish Golden Age and all the colonial weight of European art history surrounding it, Xa and Vallejo interrupt art\u2019s unrelenting relationship with wealth and accumulation. Velazquez was painting at the height of Spain\u2019s expansion across the Americas; although his works are rightly celebrated as masterpieces, they provide a dark historical backdrop for the creaturely evocations of Scorpion<\/em>. What are the possibilities for change, for transformation, and for political action in the violent wake of colonization? The history of human exploitation and the associations with conquest form an outer layer for these creatures who live in other worlds, persisting, surviving, and resisting the dominance of human knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sound plays a significant role in all Xa\u2019s performances and installations. She works with sound intuitively, like a painter would, mapping out rhythms and swells and orchestrating sound through collage techniques. Her works are theatrical in effect but sincere in intention, particularly when the voices of birds and animals mix with those of human guides. Moon Poetics for Courageous Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers<\/em> (2020) is a six-part narrative sound work produced for Somerset House Studios\u2019 online residency \u201cAssembly: Sonic Terrains\u201d and it became the main sound work for recent solo exhibitions at Remai Modern (Saskatoon) and Leeds Art Gallery. Based loosely on a Korean shamanic narrative, the work tells stories of survival on a planet in decline and suggests possibilities of resilience through a host of creatures. The voiceover, provided by Samantha Lawson, directs you to close your eyes, to meditate, to breathe, to float, to become part of an atmospheric watery realm where coexistence with animal kin seems possible. It is a work of lucid dreaming; listening engages something untethered from the physical world. \u201cBehind the arc of disaster, it\u2019s possible for a new world to emerge\u2026 there are a million paths into the future,\u201d incants the narrator. If you can release skepticism (a difficult but urgent task for our fraught present), it\u2019s possible that such a work offers not only a sonic representation of animal life but also an experience of it. Become a dangerous daydreamer, it says, become ready for the spirit of a different consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Symbolism is usually associated with visual iconography, but sonic symbolism can also be a powerful aesthetic form, as voices, calls, rhythms, or tonalities produce interpretations beyond language. In Moon Poetics\u2026<\/em>, many of Xa\u2019s familiar figures are present in their sonic forms\u200a\u2014\u200aorca, seagull, fox, conch shell, and cabbage along with mountain, ocean, moon, fish and many others. Tuning in to the communicative capacities of animals bridges the divide that language produces. Or, at least, it can help us approach the limits of human senses and encourage ways of thinking beyond them. Animal stories figure prominently in many cultural myths because they reframe human concerns in ways that are approachable and broadly relatable. In treading into this creaturely world, Zadie Xa orchestrates narratives that connect humans with non-human kin, addressing the real and ever-present threats of environmental disaster, but without the local specificity that precludes shared experience. Her animal messengers are a reminder that sentient beings exist and survive all around us. Art becomes a way for us to attune ourselves to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Symbolism isn\u2019t a genre per se, and it\u2019s difficult to pinpoint a historical lineage because the boundaries are so broad. A symbol is a search for meaning behind the logic of the present, a way to access what is unknowable, beyond consciousness. Symbolism and ritual have become a frequent part of contemporary art practices as we live through a time of grief, reckoning with mass species extinction, pandemics, an increasingly unliveable planet, war and conflict. We need things to hold onto. Artists give us tools to communicate beyond language, to feel infinite or tiny, to imagine other realms and other worlds, to consider ancestors and futures and desires and dreams, to let our minds become truly expansive in thought. A shift in social consciousness is profoundly necessary and, although art can\u2019t necessarily produce that on its own, it can offer a reorientation, if briefly.<\/p>\n
Crossroads<\/em>, installation view (detail),
4488 Juneau Street, Burnaby, 2021.
Photo : Dennis Ha, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Country Balance<\/em>, exhibition view, Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto, 2021. <\/em>
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
VI. Mantis<\/em>, 2021.
Photo : LF Documentation,
courtesy of Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
Zadie Xa\u2019s Animal Messengers<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Scorpion<\/em>, installation view, The National Gallery, London, 2021.
Photo : Andrew Bruce, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Scorpion<\/em>, performance views,
The National Gallery, London, 2021.
Photos : Andrew Bruce, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Moon Poetics for Courageous
Earth Critters and Dangerous Day Dreamers, <\/em>2020.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n