Review of Amelia Earhart and Elena Imari Hoh’s exhibit at Slice of Life

What happens when home strays from the concept we learned and imagined as children? Local artists Amelia Earhart and Elena Imari Hoh explore this question and the ways that a seemingly simple concept, “home,” is complicated and distorted for mixed children of diaspora. Yet, their recent exhibition, In Place, Make Space, at Slice of Life offers home as something we find and embrace in memories, connections with people, and even foreign places; they celebrate home through the intangible and as something we actively form, rather than something we can lose.

Throughout the exhibit, the icon for home that many of us grew up drawing–the triangle on top of a square, maybe sometimes with an additional window or rectangle chimney–appears. It’s an icon that invokes everything from the nuclear family to shelter, stability, security, and safety; therefore, it is also subject to strained relationships based on lack and scarcity. 

For Earhart, drawing the house becomes a way to externalise it as an object, detaching it from its idealisations and associations and instead opening oneself up to alternative forms and shapes of home. 

“When I was growing up, I always dreamed of having a house like that, or just the cookie cutter sort of thing. Drawing them as just an object, not as an actual place to reside in, helped a lot. When you're younger and you're a child, you're drawing that same shape as a house. You’re dreaming of it, but it doesn't have to be that shape. It can be anything,” says Earhart.

Meanwhile, Hoh identifies the motif as the two-walled house, the "permeable house.” She explains, “It still has all the usual features of a house...but the lack of two walls implies an unavoidable relationship to the surrounding environments and elements. It’s the house that lets rain in…Its main purpose isn't really to keep me alive. It feels more like a frame.”

The two artists challenge limited and material conceptualizations of home. Instead of the house as the centre of attention, the object of desire, and the site of projected values, it acts as the framework through which to observe the rest of the world and to question what is let in and what is let out. 

Inspired by Hoh’s recurring rock character, Earhart draws a bird that similarly simply watches and perceives. In Looking/Just, Earhart’s bird perches on the roof of a permeable house, looking through the house and into the forest scenery on the other side. For Hoh, this observant nature is reflective of an acceptance of the unknown and willingness to receive what is to be learned as they come: “I wonder if that's just this phase of life. Who am I? TBD. What do you believe in? TBD. When I was eighteen, I felt like I knew everything, and now I really don't. I'm just trying to figure it out.”

What does it mean when home becomes a framework, a lens through which to perceive? Both artists visually translate their memories. By transporting viewers to memories of their own, Earhart and Hoh offer sweet nostalgia and the intertwining of collective memories to feed the yearning for home. Their art rejects home as a single thing and opens us up to the possibilities of bonds that can form between strangers and the convergence of our separate experiences that allow new definitions of home, even if for fleeting moments. 

In fact, outside of the exhibit’s artist-viewer relationships, Earhart and Hoh themselves met over Instagram only recently during the pandemic. Despite their different backgrounds and the physical distance, both found a striking comfort and connection between each other, as Earhart describes, “We came together really easily, as our relationship kind of grew naturally.” 

The two artists collaborated and created pieces just for the show and found that their artistic visions and approaches aligned effortlessly. “We didn't really change each other's work at all. We just put it together, and we barely edited anything. We would just draw it, and pass it back and forth. A lot of it felt right. It felt done,” explains Hoh. 

Upon first view, Hoh’s abstracted landscapes are new and familiar. Her odes to the countryside reflect on the unexpected triviality of time spent in one place, as the places she feels most at peace are “where [she] really didn't spend a lot of time growing up, and somehow feel more at home there than [in her] hometown.” Her work, Love Summer, conveys the serenity of the summer countryside at night time through the close patches of varying shades of blue and green. I can hear the cicadas and the landscape, pregnant with the magic of when skies and land are blurred in one expanse and you feel absorbed and held by the universe, as well as the quiet electricity of unspoken young love. 

Meanwhile, Earhart’s eggs invoke warmth and comfort through a great, brilliant yolk. When homesick, Earhart thinks of their mom’s cooking growing up and learning how to make fried eggs. In their piece Silog, a child curls up amongst ingredients in a bowl and peacefully naps. Silog honours the Filipino breakfast dishes while emphasising the dishes’ inseparability from Earhart’s identity and the comfort they find in the simple ingredients. The egg is such a staple across cultures that I can envision an image of myself, curled up in a bowl with 荷包蛋, embracing me in a blanket of golden yolk and soy sauce running down my sides. 

In their collaborative effort, Earhart and Hoh create two sculptural pieces: two houses entitled one day apart, placed in conversation with hanten–the traditional Japanese winter coat. One of the houses sits upon hanten 2 (am I?), while the other is sheltered under hanten 1 (child’s hanten). With prints of a house on the inside of hanten 1, the children’s coat simultaneously invokes the significance of childhood in forming homes, as well as the experiences and homes that each individual carries with them, invisible to others until we take our coats off. 

For Hoh, the hanten “projects a body into the space immediately” that can “interact with the sculptures in a way [her] body couldn't interact in the same way.” Having the hanten laid out below or covering the permeable houses emphasises the ways in which home is not concrete, but varies and is shaped by individual experiences. 

Hoh’s hanten reminds me of Earhart’s eggs: both simple and quotidian but significant and memorable in our lives. “They keep us warm. They’re protective…It’s a priceless gift of labour, to create something that keeps somebody warm,” Hoh muses.  

As labours of love, both eggs and hanten emphasise home as sensations of comfort and safety that we can find and nurture through our connections with the external world. Thus, just as our interactions with others shape our perceptions, there is comfort in knowing that home and what it signifies can be ever-shifting. Home does not necessitate a static concept that embodies societal values we may not always fit or be able to achieve. Home is the 5AM glow across a rice cooker, the slippers my aunt knitted for me, falling asleep on a loved one’s shoulder, and the mossy patch on a fallen log. 

Follow Amelia Earhart (@aaaearhart) and Elena Imari Hoh (@elenaimaritattoo) on Instagram. 

Cathy Xu (she/they) is an emerging Chinese and Canadian storyteller. Her work explores diasporic narratives and knowledge productions, bodies as archives of memory and homeland, and sites of BIPOC and queer resistance and futures. She is especially interested in storytelling through food and reinterpretations of mythology and fantasy. In her day to day, she dreams of pastries and observing plants and bodies of water. Follow her on Instagram (@cathy_jzx).