SoundBites

Roger Mooking: SoundBites September 11–November 8, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6:00–8:00 pm, co-presented with Prismatic Arts Festival

SoundBites is Roger Mooking's first solo exhibition in Atlantic Canada, bringing together visual art, moving image, music, and text in an immersive exploration of creativity, memory, and the rhythms of contemporary life. Drawing inspiration from the sampling traditions of Hip-Hop, Mooking recontextualizes reproductions of his own artworks to create a dynamic multidisciplinary environment. Just as musical sampling transforms existing sounds into new compositions, SoundBites remixes visual and sonic elements to reveal unexpected connections across media, embracing what Mooking describes as "a celebration of chaos."

The exhibition is inspired by Mooking's sixth solo album of the same name and the accompanying publication Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements, created in collaboration with acclaimed writer and artist francesca ekwuyasi. Echoing the album's structure, the exhibition unfolds through three interconnected movements: The Learning, from childhood through adolescence; The Living, the most expansive and active phase of life; and The Leaving, a meditation on aging, legacy, and mortality. Together, these movements invite audiences to reflect on how experience is accumulated, remixed, and reimagined over the course of a lifetime.

About the Exhibitions

Presented concurrently, Roger Mooking: SoundBites and Burnt Sugar Blue, curated by francesca ekwuyasi, explore how contemporary artists activate histories and cultural memory beyond conventional archives. Through material culture, sound, storytelling, image, and installation, the two exhibitions examine how memory is continually reconstructed through artistic practice, creating new forms of belonging, resilience, and collective imagination across generations and geographies.

The exhibitions are connected through Curious Sounds: A Dialogue in Three Movements (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023), the collaborative publication by Mooking and ekwuyasi that inspired SoundBites. Richly illustrated and interdisciplinary in form, the book brings together essays, conversations, photography, visual art, music, lyrics, and micro-stories in a meditation on creativity, Blackness, family, grief, storytelling, and the rhythms of everyday life.

Through immersive installations and multisensory encounters, SoundBites considers how creativity emerges through collaboration, cultural exchange, and the continual remixing of ideas, memories, and lived experience. QR codes integrated throughout the exhibition connect visitors to songs and short stories from the project, encouraging audiences to move beyond observation and become active participants in the work, revealing new layers of meaning through listening, looking, reading, and touch.

Trinidadian-born and Canadian-raised, Roger Mooking is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves fluidly across varied mediums. A JUNO Award-winning musician, chef, author, and visual artist, he draws upon these intersecting disciplines to examine identity, lived experience, and the ways stories are carried, transformed, and shared.

Visitors are encouraged to bring a smartphone and headphones or earbuds to access the exhibition's audio components and fully experience its interactive elements. A downloadable playlist will also be available in the Gallery.