Upcoming Exhibitions & Events
SUMMER 2026
In Between Lights
Curated by Yijing Li, PhD Candidate
artLAB Gallery
Exhibition: July 9 - 23, 2026
Reception: Thursday, July 9 from 5-7PM
Light in this exhibition is not treated as a passive medium of illumination, but as a force through which time becomes perceptible in material form. Rather than functioning primarily as a tool of representation, light operates as an active participant in processes of transformation, shaping materials in ways that exceed direct human control. Photography here does not preserve a singular moment; instead, it registers duration, accumulation, and change. Through light, temporal processes become visible, leaving traces across organic surfaces, bodies, and environments.
The works of Michael Flomen, Ursula Handleigh, and Julia Rose Sutherland each engage photography as a process of collaboration between human intention and material agency. Flomen’s cameraless photograms register the bioluminescent movements of fireflies, allowing light to inscribe its own trajectories beyond the camera’s frame. Handleigh’s Banig (2023-present) employ banana leaves shaped by histories of migration, colonial circulation, and Filipino matrilineal traditions. Exposed to sunlight and environmental conditions, the leaves continue to dry, curl, and transform over time, carrying memory through material change rather than fixed representation. Sutherland’s Ala’toq “carry with you” (2022–23) transfers family photographs onto hand-peeled birch bark, where image, land, and memory become intertwined through processes of soaking, exposure, aging, and care. Across these practices, light does not simply reveal an image but participates in its becoming.
While these artists emerge from distinct cultural and historical contexts, their works share an investment in material processes that unfold through time. The exhibition brings these practices into dialogue not to suggest equivalence, but to explore how light translates temporal experience through different materials, environments, and photographic processes. Across the exhibition, images do not appear as fixed representations of a singular moment. Instead, they emerge through accumulation, transformation, aging, and duration, revealing photography as an ongoing negotiation between light, matter, and time.
Curation therefore operates through spatial relation. Artworks are placed in dialogue so that viewers encounter multiple temporalities within a shared environment. As one moves through the exhibition, recurring elements—light, plant matter, memory, duration, and transformation—reappear across the works, yet never in identical ways. Firefly traces accumulate across photographic surfaces, banana leaves continue to change through environmental exposure, and family photographs carried on birch bark connect personal memory to longer histories of land and kinship. The exhibition space becomes a site where these different experiences of time coexist and intersect.
Rather than presenting time as universal or singular, In Between Lights invites viewers to consider how temporal experience is shaped through material processes and embodied relationships with the world. Light functions not only as the condition of visibility but as a force that translates time into material form. Photography becomes the site of this translation, while the exhibition provides a space in which viewers encounter its different manifestations. In doing so, the exhibition asks how images might allow us to experience time not as something measured and fixed, but as something carried, accumulated, transformed, and shared across bodies, materials, and environments.
TBA
Cassie Packham, MFA Candidate
artLAB Gallery
Exhibition: July 30 – August 13, 2026
Reception: Thursday, July 30 from 5-7PM
