TMU students showcase work at Nuit Blanche 2025
The Routes/Rooting: Works so far team, who has put together a compelling exhibition of sculpture, bio art, installation video, community-engaged projects and performance documentation. Check it out at Artspace TMU during Nuit Blanche on Oct. 4. (Photo: Chip Lei)
Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) PhD students are bringing their creative research practices to Nuit Blanche on October 4, with an exhibition that turns academic work into powerful visual experiences.
Routes/Rooting: Works so far (external link) features sculpture, bio art, video installations and performance documentation from six Media and Design Innovation (MDI) program students. The show runs through October 11 at Artspace TMU inside 401 Richmond.
The exhibition opened on September 18 to nearly 100 visitors, including Creative School Dean Natalie Alvarez.
From studio to gallery
The work grew from Artspace TMU’s first Creative Research Intensive Summer Program (CRISP). For eight weeks this summer, six artist-researchers transformed Artspace TMU into a shared studio space.
“Instead of a gallery where you look at pictures on the wall, this gallery really transformed into a living and open studio so people can come and engage with artist-researchers doing their work,” says Andrew Lochhead, manager and director of Artspace TMU. “It's a chance for researchers to bring their research into public, to share their methods and processes in a direct way.”
The exhibition explores themes of identity, mapping and performance. Its title draws on philosopher Doreen Massey’s concept of space as a “story-so-far,” showing the always-evolving nature of creative or arts-based research.
Meet the artists
Deanna Armenti is a queer faegender poet, zine creator and textile researcher. Her research focuses on queer temporalities, seeking liminal spaces and “slices in time” to convey the non-linear spectrum of queerness.
Deanna Armenti created Other Than, a large-scale textile sculpture exploring folklore and queer ecology — a lens for understanding nature, biology and sexuality. The piece weaves together traditional techniques like crocheting with 3D printed elements and foraged plants from High Park.
Erin Thurlow is a visual artist, writer and researcher. His research explores the natures of creativity and how they respond to, implement or resist technological disruption, particularly at the intersections of political upheaval and environmental crisis.
Working after dark, Erin Thurlow used his bike to track a bus route near his house. He created Waiting Pictures by pressing photo paper against bright advertising panels in transit shelters.
Shelter for Now is a scaled-down model of a transit shelter that invites viewers to imagine an encounter.
Nia Alexander Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher whose work explores storytelling as a tool for cultural memory, connection and liberation. Her practice emphasizes inclusive, community-rooted approaches that center the experiences and imaginations of marginalized groups—particularly Black women.
Nia Alexander Campbell uses mixed media collage, speculative worldbuilding and doll designs, board games and more to explore themes of joy, play, identity and Black feminist thought.
Using papermaking, casting and textile work, she considers how different materials reflect the narratives tied to each character.
Paola Poletto has a dual career as an artist and arts professional in leadership, curatorial and museum education. Her work includes photography, drawing, sculpture, writing and creative collaboration with a focus on the ethics of responsibility, sustainability and transformation within the museum, learning and civic engagement fields.
Paola Poletto’s photo-based project draws from her experience as an artist-worker in museums.
Museum in Water decentres her gaze and examines power structures, creating what she calls “meaningful destabilization.”
Rosalina Libertad Cerritos is a Salvadoran-Canadian moving image artist and researcher. Her creative practice-based research revolves around activating and utilizing her cultural, ancestral and historical knowledge at the intersection of emerging digital technologies and art.
Rosalina Libertad Cerritos developed a personal archive of photographs and materials from her early childhood after immigrating to Canada from Mexico.
The multisensory project explores immigration, displacement, land, memory and Mesoamerican mythology through 3D modelling, printing and digital moving images.
Stephen Severn is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose practice-based research explores human-material encounters and queer/trans ways-of-becoming. They frequently employ sculpture, installation and sound to assemble embodied sonic and spatial transformative sites of emergent futurity.
Stephen Severn's work explores sound and gender through interactive installations.
The project features a 3D-printed hand with copper fingernails that activate sound when touched, alongside snapshots spanning 2-0 years that are dipped in beeswax and arranged out of order.
Visit during Nuit Blanche
“Nuit Blanche is a real chance to put the high quality of artistic and scholarly work happening in the Creative School and the MDI program in front of a larger public,” says Lochhead.
Artspace TMU (external link) TMU will be open late for Nuit Blanche on Oct. 4, from 7 p.m. until 2 a.m. on Oct. 5, at 401 Richmond St. W., Suite LL106. The exhibition runs through Oct. 11 and is open Wednesday to Saturday from 1 to 6 p.m.