In March 2020, New York City fell silent. The streets emptied, the subway platforms stilled, the constant hum of eight million lives contracted into an eerie quiet. Photographer Viet Chu walked through this transformed city, documenting a moment that felt both surreal and absolute, iconic locations drained of their animating force, frozen in an absence that seemed permanent.

Four years later, artist ADA returned to those same places. But she came not with a camera, but with a microphone. At Mercer Street downtown, along the Upper East Side, on Chelsea’s 10th Avenue, at the Wall Street bull, she captured what had returned: the layered soundscape of urban life reconstituted.

Echoes of New York pairs Viet Chu’s pandemic-era photographs with ADA’s sonic responses, creating a dialogue across time that is both documentary and deeply emotional. The exhibition’s title operates on multiple levels: the echo of empty streets now refilled with sound, the echo of a traumatic past reverberating into the present, and the literal acoustic echoes that give shape to urban space. Together, these works trace the city’s recovery, its resilience, and the stubborn return of life to places that seemed, at least for a short while eerily quit.

Viet’s photographs possess a haunting beauty. Familiar New York landmarks appear almost post-apocalyptic in their desertion. Spaces that should buzz with movement rendered uncanny by their stillness. These images captured something we had never seen before and hoped never to see again. Looking at them now, they feel both immediate and historical, documents of both the collective trauma and recovery.

But the photographs, for all their power, contain an absence within the absence. Looking at them, you can hear the silence.

This is where ADA’s intervention becomes transformative. Working in the daeuArt Notes methodology developed by artist Daeu, ADA has created visual abstractions from the sound frequencies of these locations as they existed four years after the photographs were taken. The process is both technical and revelatory: field recordings are visualized through their heat maps, mapping sound frequencies into color and form. Through digital abstraction that never alters the underlying frequencies, the inherent visual nature of sound emerges… and with it, something unexpected. The content of the sound seems to encode itself into the image, creating visual echoes of the recorded environment.

Hung beside Viet’s photographs, Ada’s sound visualizations complete a circuit of meaning. Where the photographs show us absence, the sound pieces assert presence. Where the photographs capture a moment of collective pause, the sound works vibrate with the return of urban rhythm. The pairing creates a temporal echo chamber… 2020 and 2024 speaking to each other across the divide of recovery, bearing witness to both what was lost and what has been reclaimed.

The specific locations anchor this dialogue in New York’s physical and symbolic geography. Mercer Street downtown, the Upper East Side’s residential elegance, Chelsea’s 10th Avenue with its mix of industrial past and contemporary art present, the Charging Bull of Wall Street… each location carries its own resonance in the city’s cultural memory. During the pandemic, these places became ghostly versions of themselves. In ADA’s recordings, they pulse with renewed life, their acoustic signatures testament to our persistence.

Echoes of New York joins a tradition of artists exploring the relationship between sound and vision, from Kandinsky’s synesthetic experiments to contemporary digital work with spectral analysis. But this exhibition also participates in a more specific tradition: art as witness to historical rupture, as a means of processing collective trauma, as evidence of survival. The pairing of Viet’s and ADA’s work creates what we might call a documentary polyptych, multiple panels that together tell a story no single image could convey alone.

What emerges is ultimately hopeful, though not naively so. These works insist that cities, like people, have the capacity to heal, to refill with sound and movement, to reverberate with life again. The exhibition suggests that resilience lives in continuation…

In experiencing Echoes of New York, we are invited to engage in an act of layered perception. We see the silence in Viet’s photographs. We see the sound in Ada’s visualizations. And in the space between them… in the resonance… we locate ourselves: witnesses to both absence and return, remembering and moving forward, holding the memory of quiet while standing in the restored noise.