Opening
Thursday, September 25, 2025
6 to 9 pm

RSVP by clicking here.

Director’s Note

It is almost a year since our transformation into The Goldfarb Gallery and, as we establish ourselves in our new home, we’re continuing to build a program that balances solo and group exhibitions, bringing together local voices with artistic perspectives from across the globe. Our calendar consists of three exhibition and program cycles annually, allowing us to present a wide spectrum of artistic practices and curatorial methods, ensuring our programming always stays current, and we are able to support artists at different points in their careers, and create multiple opportunities for visitors to engage with their work.

As part of this new chapter, we’re launching a Membership Program to bring you closer to the art and ideas we share. Members will enjoy unique experiences, from behind-the-scenes insights to special events, while helping us sustain a space for creativity, dialogue, and critical thinking. It’s a way to be part of the conversation with all membership proceeds going directly to our programs and artist fees.

We’re committed to making space for artistic risk and inquiry, to affirm art’s ability to teach and provoke, and to create opportunities for exchange between artists, curators, educators, students, and everyone who walks through our doors. Amy Ching-Yan Lam’s exhibition 83% Perfect pushes at the fabric of gallery and university ethics as the artist questions the ideals of exceptionalism perpetuated by both. In the satirical work Acceptable Protest, Lam employs an absurdist logic to raise questions about how both art and educational institutions function and, sometimes, fail to create space for meaningful dialogue, even though it is proclaimed to be the core of their missions.

Artists are often best positioned to reflect on our work and to push us toward more meaningful forms of engagement. For the exhibition Standing in the room together, curator Lillian O’Brien Davis worked with artist Michael Belmore to rethink aspects of the York University Art Collection, its relation to contemporary artists, and how it generates uncommon connections between artworks revealing untold narratives that can reorder the canons of art history. Artists have also used their work to question why and how public institutions come to collect the artworks and cultural belongings under their care. Most recently we exhibited When Water Embraces Empty Space by Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, which opened a path to rethink the University’s art collection, specifically in relation to our holdings of cultural belongings and artworks from Papua New Guinea. In our Visible Vault, we continue to present a selection of these belongings, as we research how they were acquired and originally collected by architectural scholar Thomas Howarth. We will also continue to work with Nguyễn, as he collaborates with the Luf community of Papua New Guinea to challenge colonial legacies and the responsibility of institutions to acknowledge, and, where possible, repair those histories.

Through our digital commissioning stream, we are honoured to collaborate with artist and filmmaker Alisi Telengut, premiering a new animation in the Pavilion and on our website and joining Assistant Curator Clara Halpern in a public conversation. Telengut’s work moves between micro and macro topographies to coalesce scientific and artistic observation. Using another binary structure between “everything” and “nothing,” Kelly Mark’s Everything and Nothing Between Us uses opposing poles to explore perceptual contradictions around personal value, the attention economy, and the limits of language. This presentation of Mark’s work in our vitrines is part of a city-wide celebration of the late artist’s long history of using humour within the quotidian to draw out the pathos of life.