We all have families in some form or another. Maybe it’s the family you were born into, maybe it’s the family you’ve created with a significant other, or maybe it’s the family you’ve curated with people you’ve chosen as your family. Every person’s conception of family is unique. Individual relationships, circumstances, beliefs, choices, luck, mistakes, abilities, perceptions, commitments, stigmas, and expectations feed into the intricate web of experiences and connections we refer to as ‘family’. In a world where the concept of family is as diverse as the individuals who constitute it, the deeply ingrained ideal of the traditional nuclear family somehow continues to exert its influence on public discourse and scholarly inquiry.

Part collection, part curation, part critique; The Echo You Can See confronts the mythic thrall of the image of family in Western culture. Representations of family pilfered from their original contexts are systematically reframed, untangling the mass of connotations which work to naturalise 'the family' — a heterosexual married couple with their dependent children — as the normative ideal. Although this form fails to represent diverse realities, it remains inescapable, privileging ‘the right kind of family’ by virtue of visibility. Poking satirically at this polished homogeneity of the family, The Echo You Can See deflates the fantasy by exhibiting its constructions and performances en masse.

Bringing together hoarded language from scholarship, pop culture, news media, advertising, and politics this exhibition shares a novel and overtly bias archive that highlights the tropes of family that obscure the complex, nuanced and subjective experiences we are familiar with.

Stolen from a mid-century Kodak advertisement, the phrase "the echo you can see" illustrates the nature of the dominant assumption of family; distorted more with every reverberation, thwarting the ability to understand what’s hidden by its cacophony.