Becoming
(in the light of the miracle)

Becoming (in the light of the miracle)

January 21 to May 16, 2026

Guest Curated by Farah Yusuf

Becoming (in the light of the miracle) is an exhibition about emergent phenomena, spanning deep time to AI. The artworks draw inspiration from natural systems, neural networks, and social structures revealing how complexity occurs from simple rule-based interactions to create a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Becoming invites viewers to consider other-than-human natures, how they might cohere as entities and come into being. 

Click here to view the Becoming (in the light of the miracle) Exhibition Publication

^{Above Image Credit: Alex McLeod, 333 (detail), 2025. Image courtesy of the artist in collaboration with his PC.}

Guest Curator

Farah Yusuf is an independent curator whose practice explores themes of cultural identity, hybridity, language, and technology. She has curated exhibitions for the Textile Museum of Canada, Trinity Square Video, InterAccess and Blackwood Gallery, and works at the Centre for Emerging Artists and Designers at OCAD University.

She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards. Yusuf holds an MA in Experimental Digital Media from the University of Waterloo and a BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practices at OCAD University where she was awarded the Curatorial Practice Medal and Governor General’s Academic Medal.

Artists

Ingrid Bachmann is a multi-disciplinary artist who has presented her kinetic and installation works nationally and internationally in exhibitions and festivals. Bachmann’s interest in bodies—animal, machine, and human—is reflected in her artworks and in her contributions as a writer. Bachmann lives and works in Montreal and is a founding member of Hexagram Institute for Research and Creation in the Media Arts and professor emerita at Concordia University, Canada. 

Notable exhibitions include the 11th and 15th Havana Biennial (Cuba), Manifestation d’art International 6 (Quebec), Command Z: Artists Exploring Phenomena and Technology (USA), I don’t know you like that (USA) and Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body (USA). She has contributed essays to several anthologies and periodicals and exhibited in Canada, Belgium, the United States, Estonia, Singapore, Peru, Germany, Brazil, the UK, and Cuba. http://ingridbachmann.com

Catherine Blackburn was born in Patuanak Saskatchewan and is a member of the English River First Nation (Denesųłiné). She is a multidisciplinary artist and jeweler, whose narrative work often addresses Canada’s settler-colonialism. Her work grounds itself in the Indigenous feminine and is bound through the ancestral love that stitching suggests. Through stitchwork, she explores Indigenous sovereignty, decolonization and representation.

Her work has exhibited in notable national and international exhibitions including Radical Stitch, Àbadakone, Santa Fe Haute Couture Fashion Show and Toronto Indigenous Fashion Week. She has received numerous awards for her work including the Sobey Art Award longlist (2019/2023), a Forge Residency Fellowship (2022), and an Eiteljorg Fellowship (2021). https://www.catherineblackburn.com

Zev Farber is an interdisciplinary artist from Toronto, Ontario. He completed his undergraduate degree in music at the University of Toronto and received an MFA in visual art from York University. Farber has exhibited, performed and published work in a wide variety of settings in Canada, Australia, the United States and South Korea. In addition, he actively collaborates with many artists and musicians on notable commissioned projects. 

Farber has been a recipient of grants from the Ontario Arts Council. He has been teaching in the field of new media art since 2009 and currently leads interactive and generative media courses at OCAD University in Toronto, while also running OCAD U's RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers. https://www.zevfarber.com

Sarah Friend is an artist and software developer from Canada, currently based in Berlin, Germany. In 2024, she was a Creative Resident with IDEO and taught as part of the Dweb Curriculum for Creators at Gray Area, San Francisco. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, and in 2022, she was a visiting professor at the Cooper Union. 

She has exhibited at and worked with MoMA (NYC), Centre Pompidou (Metz), Kunsthaus Zürich, HEK (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), ArtScience Museum (Singapore), bitforms (NYC), Albright Knox Museum (Buffalo), Rhizome (NYC) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin) among others. https://isthisa.com

Robert Hengeveld is a Elmastukwek, Ktaqmkuk (Corner Brook, Newfoundland) based artist. His practice explores our perception and preconception of the (post-)natural world through diverse sculptural forms (roller coasters, swarm robotics and collected beach plastics). He often collaborates with engineers, musicians, choreographers, poets, community members, and other artists. His artwork has exhibited internationally and is held in various public and private collections. 

Past and upcoming exhibitions include Bonavista Biennale (Bonavista, NL), Diriyah Art Futures (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia), Science Gallery (Melbourne, AU), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, LV), KWAG (Kitchener, ON), Art Athina (Athens, GC), Alternator (Kelowna, BC), Mercer Union ( Toronto, ON), Mulherin Pollard Projects (NYC, US), and Opinion Makers (London, UK). https://roberthengeveld.com

^{Camille Jodoin-Eng, Greenhouse, 2015, Acrylic, MDF, Electrical Components. Image courtesy of the artist} 

Camille Jodoin-Eng is a Toronto-based artist who has developed a growing visual language of symbols that reveal the intuitive and indefinite. Her studio practice combines mirrored structures, light, discarded trash, glass, paint, and ink drawings. Often inspired by shrines and temples as spaces devoted to reflecting on other worldly existences, her work engages with symbology and mysticism to create physical manifestations that contemplate earthly and spiritual existences. 

Jodoin-Eng completed her BFA at OCAD University (2014). She has been a collaborator of Patel Brown Gallery since 2020. Jodoin-Eng has exhibited throughout Ontario and Quebec. Selected commissioned installations in Toronto including Sunlight Garden (2023) at 688 Dundas St E, Water Shrine (2019) at Nuit Blanche, and Sun Vault (2019) at the W Hotel. http://www.camille-jodoineng.ca

Diane Landry, based in Quebec City, studied and worked in natural science and technology, until she decided to become an artist at 25. Initially a painter, she moved towards the production of installation and performance works influenced by readymade objects and her preoccupation with recycling. In short, she tinkers, she putters. She likes to put herself in contexts that shake up her creative habits, by doing artist residencies across various cultures. Her works have been exhibited globally. 

She obtained a BFA from Université Laval, Quebec (1987) and an MFA from Stanford University, California (2006). In 2014, she was awarded the Jean-Paul Riopelle career grant, from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. She received a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, grant in 2015. Recently, she receivedthe title of Compagne de l’Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. She has completed numerous commissioned artworks and is included in several collections. Landry is represented by Carl Solway Gallery, Ohio. https://dianelandry.com

Alex McLeod, a Toronto-based artist, creates hyper-real digital landscapes, sculptural simulations, and time-based installations that blur the line between physical matter and rendered possibility. Working primarily with Cinema 4D and Unreal Engine 5, McLeod composes luminous terrains, architectures, and artifacts that behave like living systems—growing, eroding, and recombining under algorithmic weather. Bridging fine art and experiential media, McLeod’s practice emphasizes craft, clarity, and world-building while remaining attentive to historical image-making and the politics of spectacle. 

His recent work extends into interactive environments and sound-responsive visuals, inviting viewers to navigate shifting thresholds between presence and projection. He co-founded ORXSTRA, a platform for collaborative visual and sonic research. McLeod’s projects have appeared in galleries, corporate lobbies, and public screens internationally, reflecting a belief that art should move—like light—through many rooms. https://www.alxclub.com

^{Meryl McMaster, Murmur I, II, III, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.}

Meryl McMaster is a Canadian artist with nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), British and Dutch ancestry. Her lens-based practice incorporates the production of hand-crafted materials and performance forming a synergy that transports the viewer out of the ordinary and into a space of contemplation and introspection. She explores the self in relation to land, lineage, history, culture and the more-than-human world. 

She has won many notable awards including the Scotiabank New Generation Photography Award, and the REVEAL Indigenous Art Award. Her work is in many public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Solo exhibitions include at the Heard Museum, Remai Modern, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Merignac Photo, Canada House London, The Image Centre, and Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, amongst others. McMaster is represented by Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto, Canada) and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain (Montréal, Canada). http://merylmcmaster.com

Free Public Events

Opening Reception – Wednesday, January 21, 2026, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West, Toronto 

Join us for the launch of Becoming (in the light of the miracle) + The Delaney Family Emerging Curator’s Prize: Metabolic Loop and The Shared Flight 

Becoming (in the light of the miracle) Curatorial Tour with Farah Yusuf - Friday, February 06, 2026, 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West, Toronto 

Join guest curator Farah Yusuf for an in-depth curatorial tour of Becoming (in the light of the miracle)

Visit Registration Page

Onsite Gallery’s Annual Curatorial Lecture

Andrea Fatona: Making Our Way

Wednesday, February 25, 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

MCA 190 (Auditorium) 100 McCaul Street, OCAD University

Onsite Gallery is thrilled to announce its annual Black History Month guest curatorial lecture featuring esteemed curator Andrea Fatona. Co-presented with the Centre for the Study of Black Canadian Diaspora, this event highlights the vital role of fostering dialogues on Black history, art, and culture within and beyond our communities.

For Making our Way, Andrea Fatona will present a powerful reflection on her 35-year journey as a curator and researcher dedicated to making visible the work of Black Canadian cultural producers. Drawing from decades of curatorial and research practices, she explores how exhibition-making and archival research can become vital tools for navigating questions of belonging, memory and power. In the lecture, she will weave together three interrelated strands that shape her work: collaboration, research as relational practice and space-making, offering an insight into how cultural work can foster connection, care and possibility. 

Joining this talk, Dr Joanne Joachim will be in conversation with Andrea Fatona, inviting us to consider: How do we "make our way" within institutions while also imagining alternatives?

ASL Interpretation will be provided for this lecture. A reception will follow.

Visit Registration Page

Re-Imagining Through Art – Thursday, March 26, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Online

Panelists are invited to discuss how their creative practices, research, and artistic production engage with the re-constructing of histories, the re-building of legacies, and the re-imagining of Afro/Black/Indigenous futurities. Through diverse artistic mediums—including photography, painting, textiles, and film—the discussion will explore how these practices challenge dominant narratives, center lived experience and ancestral knowledge, and open space for new ways of understanding the past, present, and future. Moderated by Susan Jama

Registration Page Coming Soon

Cultural Fermentation & Other Messy Practices of Illegibility – Saturday, May 02, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West, Toronto 

What can you see that algorithms can’t? In an age of constant surveillance and predictive technologies, this immersive day-long gathering invites participants to explore perception as a living, evolving practice. Drawing on the logic of fermentation—where transformation emerges through time, bodies, and unseen processes—we’ll engage in collaborative experiments with human and machine vision to question bias, visibility, and what escapes algorithmic notice. Together, we’ll cultivate new ways of seeing that embrace complexity, irregularity, and the power of the unpredictable.

No technical experience required—just bring your curiosity and your body.

The lecture is co-presented with UKAI Projects.

Registration Page Coming Soon

Creative Writing × Onsite Gallery GradEx 2026 – Friday, May 08, 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., Onsite Gallery, 199 Richmond Street West, Toronto 

Join us for an evening to celebrate this year’s OCAD U Creative Writing graduating cohort. Experience a diverse showcase of poetry, music, theatre, and more as students share selections from their thesis projects. Come support and enjoy an inspiring night of words, storytelling, and performance.

Registration Page Coming Soon

Forest Therapy Session with Sock Gee – Saturday, May 16, 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. at High Park
Wander slowly, breathe deeply, and gather in ritual. This small-group meditative nature walk and tea ceremony invites participants into a quiet, sensory experience rooted in mindfulness, presence, and environmental connection—an intimate offering for up to 10 guests.

To register, please email Susan Jama at susanjama@ocadu.ca

Stay tune for more upcoming free public events!

Becoming (in the light of the miracle) is generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario through the Curatorial Projects: Indigenous and Culturally Diverse program.