your voice is in every shell

murmurs gallery, Los Angeles, 23 January - 8 March 2025

Milan Kundera defines nostalgia in Ignorance as such: “The Greek word for “Return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” Loss inherently represents concepts of exponential degradation: the loss of memory, the nonexistence of home, the loss of family members and loved ones (who were at “home”).



While loss is most often perceived as an absence, stephanie mei huang’s solo at murmurs LA, your voice is in every shell, paradoxically manifests loss in sounds, events, and objects of interpassivity that retain a presence within their own cosmology. A shell is a cavity; a negative space that holds otherwise impalpable whispers. It serves as a filter for eardrums, magnifying ambient frequencies typically lost to their milieu.

Kinetic hand-drums clap and rattle behind the painted sheepskin of the drum face, depicting seashells as various forms of exoskeletons for mythological horses, while simultaneously providing a veil or shell for the  internal kinetic circuitry. In Landline, a figure presses her ear to a cordless seashell, while the other uses a seashell as a beckoning horn. Performance ephemera from the video rid of poison become a central unicorn effigy of the exhibition, lounging on a lobster trap found washed up in Malibu.


In studies of the aesthetics of nostalgia, Svetlana Boym theorizes that though restorative nostalgia seeks to literally reconstruct the lost homeland through perceived nationalist truths, reflective nostalgia makes no attempt to be truthful, delaying the physical homecoming to dwell in a prolonged state of longing and fragmentation, sometimes as a mechanism of survival. your voice is in every shell is not an attempt of an accurate retelling, but of a shell that continuously sheds and rearranges itself and its relationalities.