Listening in Place
2022, chromogenic prints mounted on Dibond
As a part of the series titled Listening in Place, these 3 images were shot in Vanier Park in what is now known as Vancouver. Formerly a site of the Royal Canadian Airforce (RCAF) station, currently Vanier Park is now a place of tourism and leisure. The activities that take place on this land do so on top of a history of violent land dispossession, as told to Yoon by Találsamkin Siyám Bill Williams, a hereditary chief of the Squamish Nation. Vanier Park was historically the land of the ancestral Squamish settlement of Sen̓áḵw, which was burned to the ground by the provincial government, displacing the families therein.
This work expresses her direct learning of these histories, both politically and aesthetically: “to embody land acknowledgements is to listen, to look differently.” In Longer View the artist replaces binoculars, an apparatus of ocular enhancement with a prosthetic prop that alludes to other ways of seeing, ways that for Yoon are linked to listening. Attunement Above and Below is a diptych. One image is of a microphone placed in front of a large Weeping Beech, a tree of European origin with networks below the earth. The second image is of the artist squatting using the same prosthetic prop – this time held up to her ears in what seems to be an absurdist dadaist gesture – listening to the ground suggesting the importance of being attuned to both the immediately visible as well as the invisible lying beneath the surface.
Attunement Above and Below (Listening in Place) 1, 2022, chromogenic print mounted on Dibond, 83.8 x 128.3 cm (33 x 50.5 22 x 33.6 inches)
Longer View (Listening In Place), 2022, chromogenic print mounted on Dibond, 83.8 x 128.3 cm (33 x 50.5 inches)
Attunement Above and Below (Listening in Place) 2, 2022, chromogenic print mounted on Dibond, 55.9 x 85.4 cm (22 x 33.6 inches)