This essay complements the exhibition Proof of Life, on view at the Jackman Humanities Institute from September 10, 2025 to June 19, 2026. Curated by Chloe Gordon-Chow, the exhibition is presented by the Art Museum in conjunction with the Jackman Humanities Institute’s 2025–26 research theme Dystopia and Trust. Click here for details on how to visit the exhibition.

In a world pushed to its limit, we seem to be teetering on the edge of apocalypse. Extremist leaders are being elected across the globe, misinformation runs rampant, the climate crisis worsens day by day, and a genocide unfolds unchecked due to international apathy and inaction. Driving towards ruin, fuelled by exploitation and extraction, catastrophe is in the air.  

Projecting into the future is a daunting task amidst today’s realities. The continuity of the Western world has been and will continue to be built on the systemic and strategic destruction of other possible worlds. By continuing to aspire to an inherently violent and colonial world order, what futures might we deny ourselves? Perhaps it would make more sense to imagine apocalypse guaranteed, the end of this world as we know it.¹ 

Inhabiting dystopia, Proof of Life explores material debris from the end of the world, considering the aftermath of our present-day ruin. Foregrounding archival matter and found or foraged objects, the artworks in the exhibition bear traces and remnants of our current world, speaking to potential futures. Amid system collapse and climatic ruin, Proof of Life responds with quiet lamentation and material reconfiguration, contending with “the end” as both an inevitability and a site of ongoing reinvention. 

The exhibition opens with Shannon Garden-Smith’s Alluvial Fan, a long sweep of marbled prints fanned on a shelf in the entrance hallway. The participatory artwork invites each visitor to take one page from thousands of printed sheets, slowly eroding the work over the course of the exhibition. The pattern is slightly glitched from the spread of the sheets, suggesting interiority and touch, reminiscent of the pages of an open book or horizontal layers of rock strata. The work loosens the original print, returning it to a state of openness by accentuating the original process through which it was made—a process that involves combing pigments into ornate patterns as they slide across the surface of a thickened bath of water. In its totality, the work embodies the slow accumulation of sediment. Subject to slow disassembly, the gesture of removal reminds us of the cumulative repercussions of collective action.  

Two gelatin lamps from Garden-Smith’s series In a Hare’s Form hang in central meeting spaces at the Jackman Humanities Institute. Lit from within, a lacework of dried and pressed plant clippings is encased in each hardened gelatin shell. Gelatin occupies an unusual terrain between consumption and preservation. It is eaten and metabolized, yet it is also used to extend the life of foodstuffs and to assist in photographic processes that hold or “fix” an image. In these works, it becomes a time capsule, preserving organic matter in a wrinkled, skin-like surface. Illuminating the space, they capture the flattened traces of once-living things, fossilized evidence of our present geological age. 

boring earth, Offering 21, Offering 25, and Offering 33 from the Offerings Series, 2024 – ongoing. Acrylic resin, shell, pewter, bottle caps, pyrite, amethyst, image transfer, paper shavings, micro plastics, bells, key fobs, bird’s nest, marbles, pistachio shells, acorn, candle wax, copper coin, wood, silver wire, white sugar, glass beads, steel nut, fish bone, cat fur, cottonwood pod, acrylic, fossils, fire, orchid stem, orach and Ontario pollinator seed, sea grass, dehydrated iris, jasmine, rose, and tulip, neodymium magnets.

boring earth’s Offerings appear as objects from the wreck, surfacing like archaeological findings from a distant future. They were conceived as ritual offerings to the spirits, ontological portals inviting communion and collaboration across plural, imbricating worlds. The shells are filled with found and foraged objects, combining organic and inorganic bodies into one. Reframing waste as precious material and orchestrating kinships between humans, elementals, and inorganic entities, they suggest the ongoing resilience of the natural world. Hidden throughout the exhibition, the shells offer a playful moment of discord—a shimmer that reveals the porous boundaries between what is felt, seen, and perceived. 

Blending symbols of currency with new growth and decay, Jenine Marsh questions systems of value that order our world. Through the repeated motif of the coin—mottled, melted, punctured with holes—currency, increasingly a capitalist abstraction, is returned to its base material form. In buildings and bridges, vessels and elements, borrowing and spending, greetings and solidarity (2022), the coin is simply a structure from which a flower can grow. Supported by a wire stem and embalmed in synthetic rubber, the flower is part organic, part synthetic, subverting a state of fleeting mortality. Here, the slippery slope of techno-futurism, ecological ruin, and structural demise lie side by side. Marsh offers a hopeful reimagining of systemic collapse, a warning sign, a re-assemblage of what we hold near and dear. Through material experimentation and destruction, Marsh interrogates the naturalization of global capitalism, calling attention to the ephemerality of oppressive belief systems as they exist within and around us. 

If the artworks by Garden-Smith, boring earth, and Marsh envision what might become of the world we presently inhabit, Ernesto Cabral de Luna reminds us of the weight of the world that we leave behind. In Trocitos de Memoria (2025), photographs of smiling faces and domestic interiors are transferred onto coloured shards of glass. This composite of archival family photographs draws inspiration from a common Latin American security practice: embedding broken bottle fragments in cement atop brick walls. Repurposed and illuminated on a light table, these glass pieces take on new meaning—as archaeological remnants, unearthed jewels, and fragmented memories. Image transfer is a common method in Cabral de Luna’s work. Through this process, the original photographs are only partially legible amongst the ruins. They are nostalgic scenes half-remembered, recuperated in slivers of hands and faces. After all, wreckage is a material substance with history. It is a site of return, a memory to be reworked, and material upon which to build anew.  

What does it mean to imagine an “after”? To speculate, to play, to engage in the practice of envisioning a future distinct from the present moment? Prospecting for radically different and better elsewheres allows for deviant ways of thinking and living in the present.² This project is responsive to the JHI annual theme for 2025–2026, Dystopia and Trust. Black, Indigenous, and queer scholars³ have long challenged the conventional notions of dystopia on a temporal level and dystopia as a condition that is equally felt. Many communities (those who are racialized, poor, and Indigenous to the land) already experience dystopia. Ruined worlds are neither imaginary nor yet-to-come. For some, the end of the world is an everyday reality. Dystopia then takes on a different weight.  

Proof of Life reframes conversations about crisis and collapse through the lens of futurity and hope. Responding to our present moment, this exhibition proposes that we share a collective responsibility to create the conditions for “other possible worlds to emerge in the wake of what is dying.”⁴ Exploring archival debris, ecological wreckage, and material ruination, Proof of Life offers a glimpse into a not-so-distant future, asking the viewer to imagine the possibility of survival amongst ruins and reconfiguration amidst decay. 

Endnotes

¹ This work is guided by the text, Preparing for the End of the World As We Know It, written by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective. The text considers how a decolonial future requires a radically different mode of existence which can only be realized vis a vis the end of the world as we know it. Already, this world is built upon the attempted and ongoing destruction of other alternate worlds – a core theoretical foundation to this exhibition. 

² Alexis Lothian, “Introduction: The Future’s Queer Histories,” in Old Futures Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 22. 

³ This project is mobilized by and indebted to the scholarship of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Adam HajYahia, Alexis Lothian, Anna Tsing, Dionne Brand, Denise Ferreira da Silva, the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, Jacques Derrida, José Esteban Munoz, Kas Saghafi, Oxana Timofeeva, and Rizvana Bradley (among many others). 

⁴ Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, “Preparing for the End of the World as We Know It,” August 2, 2020, https://decolonialfutures.net/portfolio/preparing-for-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/. 

Credits

Banner Image: Jenine Marsh, detail from Within or beyond my means (3), 2021.  Flowers, synthetic rubber, wire, train-pressed coins, acrylic varnish, steel. Photo courtesy of the artist. 

About

Chloe Gordon-Chow (b.1999) is a Chinese-Canadian curator and researcher based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is an MVS Curatorial Studies candidate at the University of Toronto and holds a BA in Art History and Sociology from McGill University. Supported by an SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, her current research mobilizes curatorial practice, exhibition-making, and public programming as a form of speculative world-making and critical intervention. She has forthcoming exhibitions at the Jackman Humanities Institute in Fall 2025 and at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in Spring 2026.