Turnbull’s photographic works make that argument with force. Hung mostly in grids, they seem at first to return to the same face, yet repetition never resolves into sameness. Motion blur smears expression into intensity; doubling splits the image from within; inversion unsettles orientation; paint and masking interrupt any fantasy that the camera might deliver an unmediated truth. In several works, the subject holds a flat photographic surrogate before her face, using the image like a mask. Photography is not treated here as a transparent record, but as another surface on which the self can be staged, revised, or withheld.

A projected video—less a conventional film than a photograph in flux—extends this logic into time. Hovering between portrait and apparition, it seems to ask whether the viewer is seeing a face coming into view or an image retreating from capture. In that uncertainty, the work becomes less about revelation than the fragile conditions under which the self can appear at all.

That tension deepens in a wall of masks, which reads at first as a crowd and, on closer inspection, a proliferation of distinct psychic states. There are multiplied eyes, elongated noses, smothering wrappings, translucent surfaces, stark white faces with vivid red lips, and masks in tones often coded as ‘flesh.’ A clear plastic mask filled with sheer nylon in a range of skin-like shades quietly unsettles any simple notion of natural or universal complexion. Nearby, a plain white mask hung alone on a white door holds itself apart; eerily calm, its closed eyes make retreat feel palpable. Perhaps most arresting is the face that emerges through a gathered white surround, whose vulval suggestion is difficult to miss. The work is not reducible to birth, but it does make emergence feel bodily, intimate, and uneasy: the self not disclosed from within, but pressing into visibility through enclosure.

Miya Turnbull, Traces, exhibition photo by Laura Sbrizzi

A group of thinner, folded masks carry that idea into a quieter register. Reminiscent of origami or children’s paper games, they render the face as something to be creased, collapsed, and reorganized. Delicate without being slight, they suggest that even in abstraction, the face remains a site of encounter. One of the exhibition’s most persistent sensations lies here: not simply the act of watching, but the reciprocal pressure of being seen.

The printed fabric panels widen that pressure from face to body. Human-like forms, masked and swaddled in sleek, neutral fabrics, appear at once bodily and nearly hollow, like skins that retain the memory of a person. Limbs vanish into blackness; elsewhere, cloth stretches away from the subject as though invisible hands arewere pulling it beyond recognition. 

The wall-mounted nylon figures make the exhibition’s bodily argument unmistakable. Part marionette, part specimen, part flayed anatomical study, they present embodiment as vulnerable, manipulable, and precariously assembled. One torso is pinned opened from chest to waist, its cavity crowded with masks. The image is blunt, but not simplistic: there is no single face hidden inside, only an interior populated by competing possibilities, by selves, carried.

Nietzsche wrote that “everything profound loves the mask,” and Traces understands why. The mask here is not simply a disguise laid over truth; it is one of the forms through which depth protects itself and becomes visible. Turnbull does not ask what face might finally exist beneath all others. She asks what it means to live among appearances that are not superficial, but constitutive—forms through which identity is negotiated, recognized, and altered. That is what gives Traces its power: it does not peel back the mask to reveal a final truth, but exposes the self as something pressured into visibility, never settled, never singular, and never still.

Amanda Marie Hull lives in Conception Bay South with her husband, Paul, and fur-child, Sookie. A doctoral student at Memorial University, she’s an imaginative eco-socialist who loves books, wine, Sunday brunch with friends, and metaphorical rabbit-holes. She believes the world remains a good place, and storytelling may save it yet.