Routes/Rooting

This exhibition showcases the creative-research of participants in ArtspaceTMU’s inaugural Creative Research Intensive Summer Program (CRISP)*.

CRISP transformed ArtspaceTMU’s gallery over the summer into a shared studio space for six jury selected artist-researchers from the Media & Design Innovation PhD Program (MDI) at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Creative School.

This program was developed by students and faculty in MDI in collaboration with Artspace Staff, TMU’s School of Image Arts, and Graduate Studies at the Creative School. 

Drawing on themes of identity, mapping, and performance Routes/Rooting holds together the implicit activations and multiple meanings implied in the homophonous enunciations of its title.

The idea of “works-so-far” appropriates a linguistic conceit from  the writing of the late philosopher Doreen Massey, who proposes understanding space as “stories-so-far” (Massey 2025, 32). The artists in this exhibition propose this construction of “so-far” as a metaphor for the always-in-process, negotiable, and speculative geographies of the creative research process. 
 
Work Cited: Massey, Doreen. For Space, Routledge, 2005.