Hart House Student Art Committee Fall Talking Walls Exhibition
November 14, 2025 - January 16, 2026
The Hart House Art Committee presents “Talking Walls: Beneath the Monument”, a student exhibition that explores the tension between collective memory and the individual voice. From the heroic imagery of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps to the quiet absurdity of Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment, this exhibition asks: what does it mean to live in the shadow of greatness, and what remains when the monument begins to crumble?
Monuments claim permanence, yet history is fragile. The stories that rise to the surface often silence the smaller truths beneath them—the private doubts, dreams, and gestures that persist quietly across time. Through painting, photography, and mixed media, the participating artists reinterpret these tensions, tracing how individuals navigate, resist, or disappear within the grand narratives that define their worlds.
Beneath the Monument invites us to reflect not only on history, but on our place within it. In an age of overwhelming images and collective memory, these works remind us of the quiet power of the human imagination: to remember differently, to question what is inherited, and to find meaning amid the monumental.
Curated by:
Mario Zhang and Eejin Choi
Hart House Art Committee
Student Projects Co-Chairs
Beneath the Monument
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D'tzach Adash B'achav
Elle Rosen
Acrylic Paint, Natural Ink (Grapes), Silver Ink, and India Ink on Paper
Named for the ten plagues in the Passover Haggadah, this piece traces the echo of distress across generations. Made primarily from grapes, it contrasts ritual and overconsumption. I made this for my siblings, small children, powerless during the pandemic, our “plague”, and trapped in a household with an alcoholic. The work holds tension between tradition and trauma, asking how ritual conceals suffering, and how memory ferments in silence.
Temple of Love
Tian Yuan Zheng
Chinese Ink and Oil Paint on Paper
The creation of this piece felt autonomous and deep in my subconscious, using traditional ink and a Chinese fur brush; the vulture is a symbolism of the death of my origins, while its vast wings travel afar and far from home: an impermanence of life and our condition, a manifestation of freedom and distance. In a bird’s flight there is both grief and longing; a deep nostalgia to a place that I can never return to. Thereafter, the temple becomes a resting place for reconnecting with lost roots, a space of mourning but also of return.
Fragility Beneath the Blueming Mudan
Lynn (Runzhen) Huang
Acrylic on Canvas
My painting reimagines the heritage of Chinese art through the dialogue between grandeur and fragility. A white tower rises at the center, surrounded by blooming white and blue mudan, symbolizing elegance and the visible monument of culture. Beneath this beauty, a tree’s roots extend downward, where five porcelain vessels hang like lanterns, embodying centuries of craftsmanship, wisdom, and devotion. Their delicate surfaces reflect the vulnerability and endurance of cultural memory. Beneath the Monument reveals that true strength lies not in permanence, but in the fragile artistry and living roots that continue to sustain the spirit of Chinese civilization.
Within and Beyond
Bahareh Shahmoradi
Acrylic and Marker on Canvas
"Within and Beyond" explores the tension between individuality and the collective rhythm of society. The left panel depicts koi fish swimming freely, symbolizing personal identity, creativity, and emotional space. The right panel dissolves into abstract, rhythmic strokes; representing the loss of individuality as one merges into the collective flow. Together, the two paintings reflect how private voices and unique forms can blur beneath the pressure of shared movement and expectation. Through color and contrast, the diptych reveals what lies unseen beneath the surface of belonging; where comfort and conformity quietly intertwine.
Berry Squared
Amelia Hui
Colour Pencil and Marker on Paper
What are these birds feasting on?
Dry Skin
Erine Haggins
Oil and Acrylic on Canvas
Tilted against her surroundings, a woman sits fully clothed in her bathtub distractedly applying lotion. The tiling above her protrudes in an odd way, indicating something awry with her space. The fantastical colours compromised with the false idea of self-care. She shares the room with her self-hatred. Her internal debate manifests through crumpled body language. The idea of loving herself feels performative. Am I repairing damaged skin, or desperately covering my loathing? She feels crushed under how a woman should look and disconnected from her authentic reflection.
The Unmaking of Venus
Aiden Shon
Acrylic on Canvas
This work reinterprets Botticelli's classic "The Birth of Venus" by rendering its subject in blue monochrome. The scallop shell has become a vortex that pulls the goddess of beauty inward, suggesting that idealized norms of beauty lead to the physical annihilation of the very human form that they celebrate. Venus’ vacant eyes and enigmatic expression signify the total disintegration of her psyche, a process that parallels her dissolution into the abyss. Ultimately, the reinterpreted subject calls attention to the ways in which the monument of beauty endures by unmaking the human body/spirit that it is predicated on.
Fallen Angels
Jiyun (Jennifer) Song
Mixed Media
This piece is supposed to show how love can lead to the demise of many. Appearing innocuous and rather beautiful, it is synonymous to the blooming of a flower, but it may carry unforeseen difficulties, as represented by the thrones. The red string of fate, often portrayed in Asian media, represents how some connections cannot be severed and are destined to be despite being a negative influence on each other. It applies to love in every domain including family, friends, and romantic and serves to portray how a public ideal can hide private pain. Between collective memory and private imagination, it asks what it means to be small in the shadow of big stories about “true love.”
In the Shadow of Light
Bahareh Shahmoradi
Acrylic and Oil on Canvas
"In the Shadow of Light" reflects on the feeling of being unseen beneath collective ideals. The figures move together toward a shared glow, while one stands apart—still, quiet, and forgotten. The light becomes a symbol of belonging and success, something that seems reachable only within the group. Through minimal form and contrasting tones, the painting expresses the solitude that exists under societal expectations and the tension between individuality and conformity. It speaks to the smallness of a single human presence beneath the vast monument of collective pursuit.
Anthems of a Shared Pulse
Hafsah Syeda
Gouache and Acrylic on Canvas
Anthems of a Shared Pulse unfolds on a round canvas where henna like lines map memory, belonging, and quiet defiance. Rooted in South Asian and Islamic visual lineages, the work carries the keffiyeh’s geometry at the centre as both pattern and a pulse. Along the edges, the phrase “From the river to the sea” is woven into the design and visible only to those who linger.
Surrealize
Irene Blasig
Acrylic on Canvas
I titled this piece “Surrealize” to reflect that it is rooted in imagination and a realization of memories. This piece is acrylic paint on a round canvas in a Surrealist style. I explored feelings of looking into the past to understand the present. The curtain in the background of the painting hangs over the night sky illustrating how this scene is an illusion, mimicking reality.
Burnt Negative Film
Hannah Burnett
Acrylic on Canvas
Burnt negative film represents a bygone era of artistically crafted movies mainly shot on film. Once the film was used, it was chemically and physically changed, unable to be used until rewound and developed. The idea that a single roll of material that took months or even years to create is so easily destroyed – and made for this purpose – is astonishing. Times have changed and the idea of losing the work created is less likely as film isn’t as unstable, but I wanted to look back and remember what was lost to get to where we are today.
Apu
Ayesha Noon
Digital
Apu takes direct inspiration from a shot in Satyajit Ray’s film Apur Sansar, where the newly wed Aparna cries looking out of her poor husband, Apu’s, tattered curtain and barred window. A shot of despair that may seem to reinforce a culture of forced marriages is upturned once you know the rest of Aparna’s (hi)story; she goes on have a most loving and happy marriage with Apu. Against monuments that attempt to freeze history's current and mythologize an instance into an eternity expressing a supposedly timeless essence, Apu depicts a momentary experience of despair that transforms into gentle strength minutes later.
Larica e Lali
Beatriz Simas
Photography
In this work, the artist embodies the role of her two great grandparents - Avô Larica, from her Portuguese side and Avó Lali from her Brazilian side. Through this work, the artist explores that despite being oceans apart, the different sides of her family are not so different after all. Through the evocation of Victorian photography, the artist wishes to relay notions of familiarity - being something that all viewers will have had contact within their own family albums - as well as bringing a different narrative into photographic discourse.
We Will Come Back When We're Married
Yangming Liu
Digital Photography
This photograph documents a handwritten note found on a wall in Luoyang, China, left by a couple in 2020: “We will come back when we’re married.” The words embody both hope and fragility — a promise that time has likely dissolved. This work reflects on the temporality of love, beauty of incompletion and the permanence of language, exploring how human expression resists disappearance even when the emotions behind it no longer remain.
In the Shadow of Memory
Wing Yee Yau
Digital Photography
In the shadow of memory, the forgotten humanity.
Reminiscence
Sofia Lebovics
Pennies, Resin, Oil-Based Ink, and Acetate
Pennies rust and change with time, as do our memories. Through a unique photo transfer technique, I have developed using UV rays, printer ink, and acetate, I construct something new from an object both timeless and out of time. Each penny is stamped with an archival image from the coin's possessor, dating from the same year the coin was minted. In this way, the people and the pennies share a singular moment in time. Through this work, I attempt to create an individualized historical database through imprinting myself on memories that have imprinted themselves on me.
To See is Not To Be
Liana Nassri
Pine Constructed Box and Acrylic Paint on Plexi
In this installation, a young girl is placed within a reflective space, her world shaped entirely by the mirror she faces. Her reflection dominates, echoing her inward gaze. Her hollow expression contrasts her neatly arranged clothing, representing the tension between how we are perceived and our personal sense of being. Children often represent all forms of innocence and untrouble nature due to their minimal understanding of the troubles that exist in the world around them. This piece aims to question how, through the eyes of a child, how simplicity can often foster feelings of unease and confusions when the question of individuality arises.
Rooted in Memory
Liana Nassri
Acrylic on MDF
This piece explores the shifting boundaries between reality and memory, between what is physically seen and what is emotionally remembered. The tree is presented in two contrasting states, one carved, rigid, and defined, the other fluid, vibrant, and open to interpretation. The MDF, hand-chiseled to form the tree’s outer structure, represents the certainty of physical reality, the tangible world as it exists in a fixed form. In contrast, the centered canvas erupts with unnatural, expressive colors, representing the way people tend to remember instances, embodying the way memory distorts, amplifies, and transforms. The tree stands as both a record of what was and a vision of what could be solid yet shifting, present yet infinite.
My Brain Project
Elle Rosen
Mixed Media Sculpture on Acrylic (Resin, Electronics, Seashells, Wires, Pills)
This work began with MRI and CT scans of my brain sliced into one-inch squares, the ground my brain sits on. I poured myself in with photographs of my eyes, my teeth, electronics, and wiring echoing the electroconvulsive therapy that rewired my life. Handmade rainbow gummy bears cradle psychiatric medications I’ve taken or currently take. My body became an archive I can no longer access, a terrain of healing and rupture. It is both evidence and elegy, a record of what was lost and what remains.
Growing Wonder
Irene Blasig
Digital Video
"Growing Wonder", is a stop motion video created by photographing and editing 385 photos of myself sketching and painting an autumn forest with my Canon EOS R100 camera and watercolour paints. I challenged myself by not using a stop motion app, shortening each video manually to be a few milliseconds, and editing them together on CapCut. Nature is a theme I explore in a lot of my artwork. Behind every monument and city is our natural world, which is beautiful and powerful and also should be recognized as significant and monumental. Empires and their monuments may rise and fall however nature, just needing space to grow and thrive, will reclaim the land.
Found Objects
Irene Blasig
Pencil on Paper
"Found Objects" is a still life done in graphite pencil. Artists often choose what objects to include in their still lifes based on compositional and aesthetic values and symbolic, personal, and societal meaning. When we reflect on the past, we can look at what artists included in their pieces. Artistic works are a record of the past and what was important to the artist and the world.
After Gauze
Seavey van Walsum
Digital
"After Gauze" is a redrawing of Robert Mapplethorpe’s “White Gauze”— which depicts the medicalisation of queer intimacy during the AIDS crisis. In 1990, Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photography exhibition "The Perfect Moment" for the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), attracted an obscenity legal suit; the Mapplethorpe Obscenity Trial. Mapplethorpe won, and his case is a landmark victory for protection of art in a time of rising conservatism in the United States. "After Gauze" modifies Mapplethorpe's work to be without gauze; and in so doing hopes that the censorship and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments will pass like they have in eras before.
Call for Submission
Beneath the Monument
Across time, civilizations have built monuments—of stone, of memory, of ideology. These towering forms are more than structures: they are symbols of power, unity, and permanence. They narrate greatness, project heroism, and invite us to remember. Yet beneath these monuments lies a quieter world—the small, flickering inner life of the individual who is asked to carry the weight of a story not their own.
This exhibition centers on the contrast between Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment. In David’s work, the state elevates one man to myth, casting him as the embodiment of collective ambition and destiny. In Kabakov’s room, that myth dissolves—leaving behind a crude launch pad and a hole in the ceiling. Here, a single man disappears not into history, but into longing.
We invite artists to explore this tension between the monumental and the invisible, between collective memory and private imagination. What does it mean to be small in the shadow of something vast? What quiet resistance, dream, or doubt exists beneath the surface of power?
While grounded in political and historical symbols, this theme does not end with critique—it opens into reflection. The contrast between David’s exalted hero and Kabakov’s vanished dreamer is not just about power and invisibility, but about the deeper impermanence of all things. Beneath every monument lies the possibility of erasure; behind every grand narrative is a silence that eventually returns.
Here, we begin to sense the fragility not only of memory, but of meaning itself. The Buddhist concept of emptiness (sì dà jiē kōng 四大皆空, literally “the four elements are all empty”) reminds us that all things—form, power, ego, and time—are ultimately empty. History, too, is cyclical. As Luo Guanzhong writes at the opening of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (14th c.), “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” In this light, the heroic and the forgotten, the monumental and the mundane, are not opposites but phases in a continual turning. This exhibition invites us to step back from certainty—not to dismantle meaning, but to soften it. To see even the grandest myths as momentary, and every ending as the quiet unfolding of something else.
We welcome primarily 2D works in oil, acrylic, or mixed media, but also invite a small number of 3D submissions that meaningfully respond to the theme. The tone is contemplative, poetic, surreal, and emotionally resonant—inviting students to respond not only with critique, but with curiosity and imagination.
Mario Zhang and Eejin Choi
Hart House Art Committee
Student Projects Co-Chairs
Dive Into the Theme
Beneath the Monument explores the tension between collective memory and individual experience, between official history and forgotten voices. At the center are two anchor works: Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985).
Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801)
Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985)
1. Monuments as Power and Narrative
Monuments—whether carved in stone or painted on canvas—are never neutral. They function as instruments of power, shaping how societies remember and what they choose to forget. As Pierre Nora observes, “[Memory] remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting… [and is] vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation” (Nora, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, 1989). Monuments attempt to arrest this fluidity, fixing memory into forms that appear eternal and unquestionable.
Consider Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801). Napoleon appears calm, commanding, almost divine, astride a rearing horse—a figure of heroic destiny. His name, inscribed alongside Hannibal and Charlemagne, positions him within a timeless lineage of greatness, obscuring the contingency of his rise and the chaos of his wars. The painting transforms a complex, violent historical figure into an eternal myth.
Our triumph in space is the hymn to Soviet country!
This logic persists into modern propaganda. Leninist and Stalinist iconography, like the countless portraits and slogans of the Soviet era, fused leader and people into a single heroic entity. Images spoke with clarity, repetition, and optimism—silencing ambiguity or dissent. They promised historical inevitability, presenting ideology as natural and eternal.
2. The Invisible Individual and the Dream of Escape
Against the grandeur of monuments and state imagery stands the fragile figure of the individual. In systems that monumentalize collective narratives, private voices often retreat into dreams, absurdities, or silence.
Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment (1985) stages this tension with irony and pathos. In a modest Soviet apartment, walls plastered with propaganda posters, a crude hole gapes in the ceiling—evidence of an anonymous man’s fantastical escape. His improvised rocket and vanished body suggest both liberation and futility.
As Boris Groys writes on Kabakov, “Under the Soviet conditions that arose during the Stalin period, everyday life coincides with ideology. In this sense the everyday really has been overcome, for it has become an ‘inhuman’ text in which ‘life’ has dissolved and disappeared” (Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 1992). In other words, private existence had no space outside of official ideology; the intimate texture of daily life was rewritten as propaganda. Kabakov responds to this condition by imagining one man’s desperate attempt to reclaim freedom—not through open rebellion, but through absurd, secret flight.
1961. B. Berezovskii. Long live the son of the Communist party!
If Soviet posters proclaimed, “With Lenin’s Name!” or celebrated cosmic triumph as a hymn to socialism, Kabakov counters with a single, invisible man—a citizen so small he can only flee upward through plaster and dust. Here lies the essence of the exhibition: What does it mean to be small in the shadow of something vast? What quiet resistance, doubt, or dream survives inside the machinery of collective destiny?
3. Cycles, Emptiness, and the Illusion of Permanence
While monuments and propaganda art claim permanence, history teaches otherwise. The opening line of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms declares:
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” (Luo, 14th c.)
This phrase encapsulates the dialectical rhythm of Chinese historical thought: no empire, however vast, endures unchanged. Unity contains the seed of division; division carries the impulse toward reunification. This cyclical logic undercuts the illusion of stability that monuments seek to project.
Similarly, Buddhism introduces a more radical critique of permanence. The doctrine of “Four Elements Are Empty” (四大皆空) teaches that all phenomena—form, sensation, perception, and consciousness—are ultimately without inherent essence. This does not mean they do not exist, but rather that they exist in dependence, in flux. To cling to power, identity, or narrative as fixed is therefore a form of delusion. As the Heart Sutra states:
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”
When paired with political history, these ideas invite reflection: empires rise and fall, monuments erode, even memory fades. Yet the cycles of unity and division, of creation and dissolution, persist endlessly. This is not only an historical observation but an existential one—about the fragility of all things we call “eternal.”
Artists are invited to interpret this tension in their own terms — whether through history, personal memory, myth, or dream. The exhibition is not only about monuments in the literal sense, but also about the invisible structures that shape what is remembered and what is forgotten.
Mario Zhang and Eejin Choi
Hart House Art Committee
Student Projects Co-Chairs
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With Lenin’s name!