Florence Yee: You Listen Better to Echoes

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Florence Yee, "Whitewashed," 2018

vinyl on found garment bag, 40" x 25”

The New Gallery (TNG) is thrilled to announce our first show of the new year, “You Listen Better to Echoes” by Florence Yee, opening January 14th, 2022.⁠

Florence Yee's You Listen Better to Echoes uses diaristic snippets in hand-embroidered essays to confront the anxieties of alienation, racialization and queerness. As opposed to what might be understood as a healing practice, it centers ugly feelings, what Sianne Ngai describes as: 

“explicitly amoral and nonchathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release.1″

It thus advocates for the admittance of skepticism, in order to keep a politically necessary ambiguity in both art and daily discourse. As a medium that is conscious of language and its failure, the text-based works dissect personal and intergenerational relationships beyond the paradigms of normative success. Their experiences seep into labels of queer, trans, diasporic, Cantonese, complicating them beyond singular understandings. Together, these vignettes testify to the ways in which certain violences are not coincidences.

1 Sianne Ngai. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 6-7.

Florence Yee is a visual artist and recovering workaholic based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Their art practice uses text, installation, and fibers through the intimacy of doubt. Cynical of liberal multiculturalism, their work attempts to step around easy signifiers of legibility. As a recognition of nostalgia’s dangerous, utopic flattening, Florence’s skeptical practice seeks to deromanticize queer, racialized experiences and destabilize linear narratives of intergenerational knowledge by showcasing failure, futility, repetition, and dead ends. Their work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario (2020), the Textile Museum of Canada (2020), and the Gardiner Museum (2019), and many others. Along with Arezu Salamzadeh, they co-founded the Chinatown Biennial in 2020. They obtained a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from OCAD U.

*Please note that The New Gallery is participating in the Alberta COVID-19 Restrictions Exemption Program, proof of vaccination will be required to visit the gallery.

TNG will be open to the public Wednesday through Saturday from 10AM to 6PM. While it’s not a requirement, we are encouraging folks to book an appointment to visit the gallery through Eventbrite. The gallery will be open to walk-ins on Saturdays.

If you don’t feel comfortable visiting TNG in person, we are happy to offer free digital tours via Zoom. If you’d like to organize a tour please contact Alexa Bunnell, our Communications & Outreach Coordinator, at alexa@thenewgallery.org and we will reach out to you with a meeting link.