Longwood Art Gallery

Untold Narratives – A Seductive Echo

January 18, 2023 – February 22, 2023

Nic Villarosa, Internal Garden, 2020, single channel video

In Roman Mythology, the nymph Echo falls in love with Narcissus, a beautiful youth who rejects her love, and instead becomes infatuated with his own reflection. Echo is cursed to lose her speech yet eager to express her longing. She repeats Narcissus’ words until the repetition becomes a language of her own. Meanwhile, Narcissus beholds his own reflection, an image he fails to recognize as his own.

Untold Narratives - A Seductive Echo probes the connection between language and self-perception. The experiences of traversing spatial, temporal, and linguistic terrains often come with the imperative of adopting a borrowed tongue. The artists in this exhibition contend with the limits and potentials of language manifested in misinterpretation, abstraction, and slippages. Their works render distorted and fragmented expressions of the self as mediated by popular culture, new technologies, experiences of isolation, and displacement. As we attempt to navigate the images of ourselves through various paradigms of meaning-making, we utter Echo and Narcissus in one breath, with repetition and soliloquy.