Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo have brought a world of murals, painted landscapes and marine forms to The Power Plant in Toronto. Opening on October 24, 2026, Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything places the visitor inside a setting where painting, sound and sculpture are experienced together.
The exhibition is Xa’s first major solo presentation in Toronto, developed in collaboration with Mayor Vallejo. Korean folklore and mythology meet questions of ancestry, migration and the ocean, with the lakeside location giving those ideas a particular setting. The Power Plant sits on Toronto’s waterfront, and the relationship between land and water extends into the exhibition’s imagined environments.
Hand-painted murals surround works made across different media. Rather than leaving painting contained within a single rectangle, the installation carries colour across the room, allowing sculpture and sound to sit within the same visual world. The result asks for movement and time: a landscape is encountered in fragments, then reassembled as the visitor walks through it.
Xa’s textile works draw on Korean patchwork traditions, setting contrasting pieces of colour around recognisable motifs. In the earlier Calgary presentation pictured here, an eye emerges from a dark central panel while pink and violet paint spreads across the surrounding wall. The seams remain visible, giving the image a physical structure that differs from the painted surface behind it.
Shells, animals and other forms recur throughout this body of work. A suspended conch carries the associations of an instrument and a vessel, while painted creatures appear within turbulent landscapes. These elements connect storytelling to the nonhuman world, moving between familiar natural shapes and images that feel deliberately unsettled.
The Toronto exhibition brings together new and existing works. It follows the project’s presentation at Esker Foundation in Calgary, with a further iteration planned for PHI in Montreal in 2027. Its changing settings allow the installation to develop across different architectural spaces rather than remain a fixed arrangement.
For visitors in Toronto, the exhibition runs until March 21, 2027 at The Power Plant, with free admission. The photographs accompanying this article document the earlier Calgary presentation, offering a closer look at the materials and imagery behind the project.