Land, Voice, and the Uneasy Echo of What Isn’t Said
Sophia Chen, Staff Writer
Photo source: Trinity Times
I first wandered into Earthwork at Hart House on a day when I’d intended to do something entirely different. I was on campus for a meeting that had been cancelled without warning, leaving me with a free hour and that peculiar, slightly disoriented feeling that comes from an abruptly rearranged day. I remember stepping outside and seeing the light change—one of those afternoons when the sky begins to dim before it should, when the weather feels undecided.
Before I knew it, the Earthwork exhibit at the Art Museum became a favourite place of mine to sit for a bit before leaving campus.
Curating Earthwork
In their curatorial statement, Mikinaak Migwans explains that the inspiration for Earthwork came from connections between the “earthworks” modern art movement and Indigenous beadwork practices not as discrete objects, but as a collective process of care.
This idea sets the tone for the whole exhibition, which works to challenge the monumental “land art” sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s, in which artists would manipulate a natural environment, such as the rocks on a beach, to create large-scale artworks. Earthwork invites reflection on land as lived, tended, remembered, defended, and healed. As stated in the museum’s press release, Earthwork re-frames a key movement in contemporary art history, reclaiming it from an Indigenous perspective.
Featuring works by Alex Jacobs-Blum, Art Hunter, BUSH Gallery, Edward Poitras, Faye HeavyShield, Lisa Myers, Michael Belmore, Mike MacDonald, and the Protect the Tract Collective, the exhibition spans sculpture, photography, and video, emphasizing land-based practices as relational rather than extractive. In what follows, I examine two of my favourite works from the exhibition, which most embody this ethic of care and relationality.
Sunset in progress, don’t look away (2025)
Image from Sunset in progress, don’t look away (Photo source: Bonavista Biennale.)
One of the most compelling pieces advancing this redefinition is Lisa Myers’s Sunset in progress, don’t look away (2025). A six-and-a-half-minute video installation, the work is a deceptively simple sequence of sunsets, filmed and reframed with a patient, almost ritual steadiness. Myers links the wide Atlantic Ocean to the shorelines of the Georgian Bay where her family has watched the sky burn itself down each evening for generations. In the installation, this accumulation of gazes becomes a way of holding two places together without forcing them into a single narrative.
By depicting the sun dropping below the horizon repeatedly, Meyers’ work captures the discipline of returning to the same view, again and again. The slow fade of colour, the churn of water, the slight shifts in cloud cover all insist on the long memory of land and water. Over this footage, the audio track introduces overlapping voices that speak of excavation, rapids “that even in our times seem insurpassable,” and the undertaking of the “opening of the 8th sea” in “1959.” The lines repeat insistently, almost mechanically, as if lifted from an industrial briefing or an engineering pitch.
While the video never directly identifies its sound footage, the language echoes mid-century tape recorders on Canadian ambitions to reorder bodies of water. In particular, its possible references to Canada’s 1959 proposals for the GRAND Canal stand out as a vast hydrological diversion scheme that would reshape northern rivers into a new inland sea. At the same time, other phrases from the voiceovers such as “yards excavated, are not just for weeds to grow on” resonate with older histories of logging on the rivers feeding Georgian Bay, where forests were cleared and waterways re-engineered with timber slides and dams to force logs past rapids. Sunset in progress blends these two registers: the grandiose futurism of Cold War water-management dreams and the more localized, workmanlike alterations of land and river undertaken for the timber industry. Myers certainly sparked my curiosity, but also doesn’t require viewers to pinpoint the exact projects referenced in her work. Rather, she lets these voices accumulate like sediment, forming a composite memory of extraction and ambition that hums beneath the surface of the images. The instruction embedded in the title—“don’t look away”—becomes an invitation to stay with the duration of place, to notice what reveals itself only through repetition.
Tucked behind soft black curtains, the installation space heightens this feeling as Myers’s video plays in a completely dark room separate from the rest of the exhibition. I’ve returned to the Art Museum for this piece several times since my first viewing, because it’s so unexpectedly cozy. The stillness of the space slows you down, the world outside the curtains gets muffled, and suddenly you’re just sitting with the light shifting across water, following tiny changes in colour and cloud cover.
When I stepped back through the curtains away from Sunset in progress, I expected to leave the atmosphere of the video behind, but another installation across the gallery caught my attention. After approaching it, I realized that this was Plant Signals (2025), also by Myers.
In-progress installation toward Plant Signals (2025)
Plant Signals by Lisa Myers (Photo source: Trinity Times)
Sixteen pages of notes, gathered under the title “Notes on the rumble and wall by Solis Oziban,” form the spine of this work. Oziban’s notes describe a person who hears a “rumble from the North” and sets out between July 20th and July 27th to investigate while collecting plants along the way. These entries read like field notes written by someone who treats uncertainty as a companion. It presents the viewer with fragments through plant pressings, handwritten notes, and an audio signal relayed from Richard Serra’s Shift, a landmark in land art whose concrete lines cut into the landscape outside King City in Ontario, about 30 kilometres north of Toronto.
Plant Signals hologram (Photo source: Trinity Times)
Plant Signals includes, in addition to Oziban’s notes, a hologram accessible by QR code that displays Serra’s sculpture. When viewed through a phone, the 3D model materializes in a long, tapered form, somewhere between stone and metal. By placing Serra’s tapered form on a digitally rendered mountainside over a satellite image of the site, the hologram draws attention to the sculptural act as both a material and conceptual marker in the landscape.
With the curator’s plaque for the piece at the very back of the room, a slight distance from the table, it is easy to immerse yourself in the idea that the fictional note-taker is the real-life artist, Myers. What makes Plant Signals compelling is the way it folds observation, movement, and collection into a single chain of attention. Oziban writes about leaving home to investigate the source of the sound, but the notes quickly shift from narrative to something closer to fieldwork on what they encountered, what they picked, what they carried back. The entries are sparse, sometimes only a sentence or two, but their brevity emphasizes the rhythm of the days spent walking, listening, gathering, returning. By the final pages, the tension between seeking the rumble and tending to the plants collapses; the two actions begin to feel like versions of the same gesture.
In the installation, Oziban’s notes rest directly atop a bed of papers with flattened leaves under the table’s glass surface, pressed and preserved with the kind of care usually reserved for archival documents. Their presence grounds the writing in the material and natural world from which it emerged. Each leaf is labeled, dried to a matte finish, its veins forming a muted map beneath the pages. Whether or not these are the exact plants Oziban collected hardly matters. The leaves function almost like a second surface of writing, suggesting that the mountain has signed the document with its own forms.
However, the “rumble” never announces itself, nor becomes an event. What we are left with is the record of someone willing to follow a faint signal, and to respond not with instruments or measurement, but with walking and gathering and writing. The work sits comfortably within Earthwork’s larger proposition that engagement with land functions through an accumulation of small, sustained gestures. Oziban’s notes demonstrate how a week of paying attention can become its own kind of terrain, one built not of monument but of patience.
In this way, Earthwork succeeds in challenging the legacy of the original earthworks movement by shifting attention away from spectacle, foregrounding our ongoing responsibilities of care and reciprocity in working with nature. Rather than monumental gestures that mark the land, the works gathered here ask what it means to remain accountable to it through an attentive presence. The exhibition also offers a compelling collection of contemporary Indigenous art rooted in Ontario, foregrounding artists whose work engages land as a living relation shaped by memory, labour, and struggle. Sitting with Earthwork taught me how our campus is full of signals that don’t announce themselves loudly. Perhaps if we learn to listen for them, they can reshape the way we move through our studies, our relationships, and our years here.
