JHI Spotlight—Chloe Gordon-Chow

Meet Chloe Gordon-Chow, a student in the MVS Curatorial Studies program at the John M. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, and curator of the 2025-26 JHI Art Exhibition Proof of Life. Exhibiting works by Ernesto Cabral de Luna, boring earth, Shannon Garden-Smith, and Jenine Marsh, Proof of Life contends with “the end” as both an inevitability and a site of reconfiguration and becoming.

Can you tell us a little about your background?

I come from a background in art history and sociology. I carry this background with me, it inflects how I see the world and approach artworks, as part of broader structures and visual cultures. I decided to curate because I wanted to pursue research that was generative and experiential. Exhibition-making is an inherently collaborative research practice. Proof of Life exists as part of a set of ongoing conversations with peers, researchers, artists, academics, and visitors to the site. Collaboration was an especially important aspect to this show, envisioning futures in an inherently collective practice. Since opening the exhibition to the public, it’s been meaningful to see how this research takes shape, generating new meaning in the world. Still, the work continues to unfold. It’s been rewarding to watch these ideas expand over the course of the exhibition’s tenure at the JHI.

Who/what are your influences/inspires you?

Much of my preliminary research for Proof of Life began with an interrogation of dystopia—unpacking its temporalities and uneven distribution. It didn’t make sense to me to frame dystopia as something future oriented when it felt as though it existed all around us. Making this exhibition became a sort of coping mechanism to our current political climate, a way for me to reframe and understand the present moment.

I was inspired by the work of Alexis Lothian, Oxana Timofeeva, Dionne Brand, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. I drew heavily from the text Preparing for the End of the World As We Know It by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective which positions dystopia as a present tense condition. They suggest that the end of the world has already arrived, especially for those who are racialized, poor, and Indigenous to the land. As a contemporary unfolding, the authors consider it our collective responsibility to create the conditions for better worlds to emerge in the wake of what is dying. This text became an entry point for my understanding of dystopia and trust. It continues to shape how I think about futurity, reframing exhibition-making as a practice of radical imagination and collective world-building. 

The JHI theme this year is Undergrounds/Underworlds. How do you see the theme manifesting in the different works featured in the exhibition?

All of the artworks in the exhibition are made from found or foraged materials. Conceptualizing the show, I was thinking a lot about material afterlives, how objects and memories live on, even in the wake of crisis or collapse. Through this lens, the artworks are framed as wreckage or debris, bringing dystopia into the present while pointing towards possibilities for reassembly. 

Take Jenine Marsh’s, Within or Beyond My Means (3), which blends symbols of exchange with new growth and decay. Through the repeated motif of the coin - mottled, melted, punctured with holes - currency is returned to its base material form. In doing so, Marsh interrupts the circulatory logic of capitalism, calling attention to the ephemerality of oppressive systems as they exist all around us. In Ernesto Cabral de Luna’s, Trocitos de Memoria, archival family photographs are transferred onto shards of glass. As a result of the transfer process, the original photographs are only partially legible amongst the ruins. His are the only artworks that feature an overt human presence. It felt important to foreground the human and emotional weight of the end of worlds. Afterall, wreckage is a substance with memory. Through these acts of reconfiguration, each of the artists form unlikely material kinships, signalling possibilities for hope through experimentation. 

About the Curator

Chloe Gordon-Chow (b.1999) is a Chinese-Canadian curator and researcher based in Tkaronto/Toronto. She is an MVS Curatorial Studies candidate at the University of Toronto and holds a BA in Art History and Sociology from McGill University. Supported by an SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, her current research mobilizes curatorial practice, exhibition-making, and public programming as a form of speculative world-making and critical intervention. She has a forthcoming exhibition at the Art Museum, University of Toronto in Spring 2026.