This autumn, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto presents a dialogue between land, memory and the precarious futures of our environment. Earthwork and Dwelling Under Distant Suns invite visitors to reconsider the very terms through which we understand landscape and history. These exhibitions are less about objects than about relations – between people, land and time – and they insist upon an attentiveness often absent from contemporary engagements with ecology and climate.
Curated by Mikinaak Migwans, Earthwork challenges the art-historical framing of land art as a Euro-American phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s. Migwans’ work is both corrective and generative, reclaiming the term “earthwork” from its canonical associations and insisting that it be understood as a practice – a way of tending, shaping and maintaining the land – rather than as the creation of monumental, isolated objects. In this redefinition, the exhibition becomes a meditation on labour, relationality and stewardship, foregrounding Indigenous histories and contemporary practices alike.
“Redefining earthwork in this way helps us think about land as part of the cycles of life and death, rather than eternal monuments outside of time,” Migwans explains. “It also helps us to see the huge labour investment that goes into maintaining relations on the land, getting away from this idea that the natural is something opposite to the human. Indigenous connections to land, especially, have been erased in colonial accounts that talk about a natural environment that is ‘virgin’, ‘untouched’, and unclaimed. Recent scholarship now demonstrates that North America’s ecosystems were cultivated over generations.”
The exhibition encompasses the Great Lakes region, taking as its starting point ancestral earthworks conceived not as static monuments but as living sites of care. Photo and video documentation by Art Hunter presents land stewardship practices at the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre in northwestern Ontario – a place of early habitation and ceremonial significance – highlighting controlled burns and other interventions that sustain the site’s delicate ecology. Michael Belmore’s snow fence installation, visible from November 2025 through March 2026, unfolds according to the seasonal cycle rather than the exhibition calendar, while Lisa Myers’ audio work encourages visitors to engage with the land through listening and movement. Alongside these works are contributions from BUSH Gallery (Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Peter Morin, Tania Willard), Alex Jacobs-Blum, Faye HeavyShield, Mike MacDonald, Edward Poitras, and the Protect the Tract Collective. A printed Engagement Guide offers visitors historical and cultural context, deepening the contemplative potential of the exhibition.
Where Earthwork centres care, Dwelling Under Distant Suns, curated by Yantong Li, turns to attention and duration. It grapples with the difficulty of visualising environmental crises that often feel distant – a melting peak, a shifting river, an unseen toxicity – and the contemporary inclination to consume these events as spectacle. Li reflects on a recent visit to Yunnan, China, where the Cangshan Mountains no longer held the perennial snow and ice they had maintained for decades. “An unstable climate has made the mountainous environment precarious, with native vegetation in gradual decline and water cycles becoming unpredictable. This sight was a direct visualisation of climate-induced catastrophe – sensed only in longue durée – and I wanted to locate methodologies to represent these disparate sites across time.”
Film-based works resist passive consumption, requiring sit-ins that transform viewing into a participatory act. Alvin Luong’s newly commissioned Cyanide Debt (2025) restages a historical mass poisoning in Bangkok, using cassava, Thailand’s primary agricultural export, as a material medium. Solveig Qu Suess interrogates archival materials to explore the downstream consequences of hydroelectric development on the Mekong River. Kent Chan extrapolates the pressures of tropical expansion under climate change to their extremes, crafting immersive visions of planetary transformation. Each work situates the viewer within time, process and consequence – creating space for reflection rather than spectacle.
Together, the exhibitions form a conversation across time, geography and methodology. Earthwork reminds us that care is active, intergenerational and ongoing, rooted in histories of stewardship and ancestral labour, while Dwelling Under Distant Suns confronts the representational challenges posed by slow-moving catastrophes, engaging with ecological precarity across time and space and translating uncertainty and loss into visual and sensory experience. Both insist on attention, imagination and ethical engagement, underscoring the capacity of art to recalibrate perception, foster responsibility and generate new forms of relational knowledge. As a meditation on the Anthropocene – on what it means to inherit, witness and act in a world shaped by human and non-human forces alike – the Art Museum’s autumn 2025 programme reminds us that attentive, sustained engagement is both urgent and necessary.
In these galleries, land is neither background nor a passive stage. It is a partner, a witness and a site of ethical responsibility. The works on display insist that caring for the world requires acknowledging its histories, observing its cycles, and responding thoughtfully to its vulnerabilities. This is not art for instant consumption or dramatic spectacle – it is art that asks us to listen and to act with intention.
Earthwork and Dwelling Under Distant Suns is at Art Museum at the University of Toronto until 20 December: artmuseum.utoronto.ca
Words: Simon Cartwright
Image Credits:
1. Michael Belmore, drift, 2025. Steel, wood, 2.43 m x 9 m x 4.5 m. Photo courtesy of the artist.
2. Art Hunter, Untitled (Controlled burn at Kay-nah-chi-wah-nung mounds), 2023. Digital print. Photo courtesy of the artist.
3. Faye HeavyShield, Clan (performance documentation), 2019. Courtesy of Blaine Campbell.
4. Michael Belmore, drift, 2025. Steel, wood, 2.43 m x 9 m x 4.5 m. Photo courtesy of the artist.
5. Art Hunter, Untitled (Controlled burn at Kay-nah-chi-wah-nung mounds), 2023. Digital print. Photo courtesy of the artist.
