Omote (面) is a collaboration between dance artist Shion Skye Carter and mask artist Miya Turnbull, who came together to exchange their artistic practices despite living on opposite coasts of Canada.

Through masks and movement, the artists explore their mixed Japanese Canadian heritage, collating and contrasting their experiences, and evoke the ritualistic nature of Japanese traditions such as the tea ceremony. Shion’s subtle, gestural choreography oscillates between meditative flow and fragmented, corrosive glitching to express the uncanny nature of Miya’s hand-made masks, turning them into extensions of the body. By exploring various ways of making the body and masks improvise with one another, Shion and Miya explore multitudes of layers of being and the self, manipulating what is revealed and what is hidden, honing in on the churning, transitory nature of identity.

The project began as a short film, the result of meeting and working together through Yume, Digital Dreams. This collaborative creative incubator presented by Tashme Productions in 2022 united Japanese Canadian artists from across the country to experiment with collaboration. The short film that came out of Yume has since been screened at film festivals and galleries across Canada, Germany and Bulgaria.

The project then evolved into a 20-minute live performance, commissioned by CanAsian Dance Festival, co-presented by Tangente and Festival Accès Asie, and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The two artists performed together with the masks in May 2023 in Montréal, Quebec and Toronto, Ontario, where they met photographer Nanne Springer, who captured the serene, haunting beauty of this project on film. Miya and Shion will expand the performance into a full-length, set to premiere in 2025.

The project also took an exciting new form as the Omote Photo Book, published through the Booooooom Art & Photo book award and available for purchase now on ArtMobile.

This project has been made possible with support from Booooooom Art & Photo book award, Canada Council for the Arts, CanAsian Dance, Festival Accès Asie, Halifax Dance, Kinetic Studio, Tangente, and Tashme Productions.