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Self-portrait #5 by Miya Turnbull. Japanese Canadian artist Miya Turnbull’s solo exhibition, Inward, Outwards, runs at Acadia University Art Gallery until Feb. 7, 2023. Photo credit: Miya Turnbull.

HALIFAX — In Japanese Canadian artist Miya Turnbull’s new solo exhibition, Inward, Outwards, visitors are greeted by hundreds of Miyas looking back at them. More specifically, hundreds of masks moulded from Turnbull’s face, her largest solo show to date, presented at Acadia University Art Gallery until Feb. 7, 2023.

The exhibit’s focal point is a wall featuring 100 of Turnbull’s masks. The space is filled with even more masks, delicately hanging from the ceiling and displayed on body-sized plinths, along with sculptures, photography, origami, and video performances.

Turnbull is a Yonsei multidisciplinary artist, who works in a variety of mediums, from mask-making, painting, printmaking, and felting, to animation. She has lived and worked in Halifax for the last 20 years and grew up on a third-generation family farm in Alberta.

Her masks are like self-portraits, ranging from the representational to the distorted, symbolizing different facets and multiple iterations of her self, an exploration of identity and self-image. In her masks, Turnbull plays with, rearranges, and distorts her features and blends her image with different characters and materials. The common link between each is that Turnbull is in all of them, somewhere in between.

“With each variation of my masks, I am attempting to continuously hone in on the transitory nature of identity, duality, and in-betweenness,” says Turnbull. “My goal is to reveal and embody something previously hidden.”

The focal point of Inward, Outwards is a wall featuring 100 of Miya Turnbull’s masks. Photo courtesy: Miya Turnbull.

Each mask starts with a mould of Turnbull’s face, which she creates by making a plaster cast of her face. She then fills the cast with plaster to create a mould, and when it dries, she has a copy of her face looking back at her. Turnbull layers pieces of papier-mâché, made of newsprint wet with a glue-water mixture, atop the mould. Sometimes copies of Nikkei Voice become part of the papier-mâché, finding a second life as part of Turnbull’s art.

Once the papier-mâché base is complete, Turnbull allows her imagination and creativity to run wild. She prints photos of her face and features, cutting them up, and collaging them onto the mask. Sometimes, it’s a small variation, tilting the eyes or turning the mouth upside down. Other times she switches the position of the eyes, nose, and mouth or adds a third eye. In another, tears run from the masks’ eyes, but the tears are made of more eyes.

Turnbull explores Japanese techniques, like indigo dyeing, origami, sashiko stitching, and calligraphy, and recently combining her image with yokai, Japanese ghosts, or demons. A new motif in her work is exploring layers, where the mask splits open to reveal even more layers below. Using her face as her subject is a way to, quite literally, observe herself from the outside.

“To be able to distort my own face, cut out the eyes, change it, deconstruct it, things I can’t do in reality, it’s a playful way to say how much does this matter, what we look like?” says Turnbull.

Half Masks Layout #2. Photo courtesy: Miya Turnbull.

In 2019, Turnbull exhibited her work alongside artist Norman Takeuchi at the JCCC Art Gallery. The exhibition was Turnbull’s return to working as a full time artist after a decade dedicated to raising her daughter. To prepare for the JCCC exhibit, Turnbull created 30 new masks to fill the gallery space and accompany the 30 masks she already had.

“I just started making. I think I made 30 more [masks in] just in a year. I was hardcore. Every minute of the day and night, I was making masks,” says Turnbull.

The exhibit became a turning point for Turnbull as an artist. She hit the ground running and has been creating new work nonstop since, presenting her work in galleries in Germany, Italy, France, the U.K., the U.S., Toronto, and across Nova Scotia in just the last three years. Now, in Turnbull’s current exhibit, she has over 150 masks on display.

“Having all that work and momentum, I said, there’s no way I’m stopping now. I just love making masks again, and I still had so many ideas, and I just wanted to show them. It’s been really exciting,” says Turnbull. “If I hadn’t been invited to that show, nothing would have been the same.”

In Turnbull’s current exhibit, she takes the masks off the wall, using them in performance art and inviting others to join her. Turnbull started by just taking photos of herself, her daughter, or her friends wearing the masks. She then started filming videos of herself, just her head and shoulders doing basic movements while wearing the masks.

“I really did have to push myself to do that, but I can see the results of that are definitely worth pursuing. So I just got to keep going,” says Turnbull.

A group photoshoot where members of the Halifax community wore artist Miya Turnbull’s masks. Turnbull stands in the centre with her face revealed. Photo credit: Tanya Canam.

Inward, Outwards features a completely new body of work for Turnbull, a group photoshoot. Involving over 50 members of the Halifax community, each participant chose a mask from Turnbull’s extensive collection. The photos feature the participants standing together, with the masks covering their faces, creating the uncanny effect of multiple distorted Turnbulls looking back at the viewer. Turnbull stands in the centre of them all, lowering her mask to reveal her face below.

“That was a new way for me to work because it’s usually just me in the studio, me wearing the masks, me with the camera, no one else is present, so this was a big community project,” says Turnbull. “I got to see [my masks] through their eyes.”

In Turnbull’s upcoming project, she will push herself even further after connecting with dance artist Shion Skye Carter through Yume. Digital Dreams, a cross-disciplinary project connecting Japanese Canadian artists. The two will perform live while wearing the masks in Montreal and Toronto as part of the CanAsian Dance Festival in May.

Layers of Self Variation #22. Photo courtesy: Miya Turnbull.

Turnbull’s work raises questions about the masks that we wear every day of our lives. Not the ones we’ve been wearing since the pandemic began, but the masks we hide behind, the parts we conceal, and what we present to others. Turnbull’s exhibit invites people to come in and stare at different versions of her face for as long as they want, to reflect on the masks they wear.

“I want [visitors to] imagine themselves, what would their mask look like, and what would it feel like to take off your face and look at it from outside?” says Turnbull. “I really do hope people reflect a bit on themselves, but I also hope they just enjoy seeing all the variations and all the different directions that I’ve been exploring. But hopefully, it can lead to some deeper insights too.”

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Inward, Outwards runs at the Acadia University Art Gallery until Feb. 7. For more information, visit www.miyaturnbull.com.