Opening Reception: 2026 MVS Curatorial Studies Graduating Exhibitions

A program of:
Little and Often
Blind Spot

Wednesday, May 6, 2026
6pm–8pm
Justina M. Barnicke Gallery
7 Hart House Circle

Celebrate the opening of the 2026 MVS Curatorial Studies Program Graduating Exhibitions! Join us at the reception for welcoming remarks, student presentations, an awards ceremony, and a performance by artist Lou Sheppard, whose work is featured in the exhibition Blind Spot.

Be the first to see the graduating students’ exhibitions:

Little and Often traces how our relationships to land, material, and community are sustained within disturbed landscapes and conditions of precarity. Working with seeds, soils, mushrooms, and plants, the artists in this exhibition foreground resilience as a collective, relational practice, continually shifting under constraint. Little and Often is curated by Chloe Gordon-Chow and features works by Maureen Gruben, Rachel Crummey, Miguel Caba, Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, and Meech Boakye and Bhavika Sharma.

Curated by Gia Liapi, Blind Spot explores the potentials of finding new uses for the tools already in our hands. Through video, installation, performance, and software, artists Shadi Habib Allah, Shu Lea Cheang, Jeremy Laing, Lou Sheppard, and Iris Touliatou examine how legibility and classification produce value to open conversations about alternative architectures to learn from and with. 

The exhibitions are produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration required.

—

About the Artist

Lou Sheppard (b. 1982, Canada) works in interdisciplinary audio, performance and installation-based practices. Lou has performed and exhibited across Canada and Europe, and he has participated in residencies at sites including the ISCP in New York, La Cité des Arts in Paris, Rupert in Lithuania, and the Banff Centre, AB, where he also served as faculty. Lou is a settler on the traditional and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq in Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia.