Current Exhibitions
WINTER 2026
The artLAB and Cohen Commons are CLOSED for installation. Our next exhibitions open on Thursday, April 23 from 5-7PM.
The Thickness of a Leaf: Meditations on Grief
Jodi Lynn Maracle, Indigenous Artist-in-Residence
Exhibition: April 23 to May 14, 2026
Reception: Thursday, April 23 from 5-7PM
artLAB Gallery
The Thickness of a Leaf is comprised of objects formed out of meditations on grief following a year of loss, chaos, and the space to breath, to experience, to mourn deeply. Grounded in personal relationships to ancestral Haudenosaunee material culture, material practices and considerations of the fallacy of healing, the objects produced as part of the residency at Western University, consider the implications of the following threads of inquiry: What is given? What remains? What is it to consider this earthly experience as a phase, a transition, like so many other points in the human experience? What becomes of us when our foundations are shaken, broken, destroyed? What is the shape of grief? Of healing? Of chosing to remain earthbound in spite of it all?
The artist invites visitors on the following dates to participate in various aspects of Haudenosaunee ancestral material cultures for what is theory without the hands to carry it out?
Wednesday April 29 from 1-3PM: Cordage
Participants are invited to listen, learn, observe and try out the practice of producing cordage from tree fibers, along with other plant fibers. Participants are also invited to contribute to communal objects on display.
Thursday April 30, 2026 from 1-3PM: Hide Tanning
Participants are invited to listen, learn, observe and try out the practice of working deer hides from their freshly skinned state to completed brain tanned, smoked, hides. Participants are invited to contribute to communal art piece for display.
Tuesday, May 5, 2026 from 1-3PM: Mending, Patching, Beading: The work of Healing
Participants are invited to listen, learn, observe and try out the practice of mending, patching and beading deerhides and textiles as a means of considering healing. Participants are invited to contribute to communal art piece for display.
EXOPHONY
Exhibition: April 23 to May 14, 2026
Reception: Thursday, April 23 from 5-7PM
Cohen Commons
Curated by Aaron Ambroso and Rojina Sabetiashraf
Work by: Maria Awaraji, Maia Cochrane, Behnaz Fatemi, Jessica Joyce, Masha Kouznetsov, Wen Li, Sasha Parmasad, Xi Jin
Exophony brings together artists whose practices engage migration, diaspora, and cultural displacement. Working across painting, video, performance, and installation, the exhibition approaches culture not as fixed, but as something shaped through tension between origin and arrival, memory and present, belonging and estrangement. This tension is the condition of making. It emerges where translation breaks down, where meaning resists equivalence, and where cultural forms change as they move across borders. It is carried in objects and gestures that arrive altered, and in bodies moving through spaces not made for them, where the distance between perception and self-understanding lingers. Borrowed from linguistics, exophony refers to expression outside one’s mother tongue. Here, it extends beyond language to include visual and embodied forms of articulation. To work exophonically is to produce from inside displacement. The artists in this exhibition work in that space of dislocation. Their works trace how meaning is (re)configured through movement, misalignment, and encounter, where continuity is interrupted, and new forms take shape.
What does it mean to speak and to make from elsewhere?
