2025 University of Toronto MVS Studio Program Graduating Exhibition

The Art Museum, in partnership with the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, is pleased to exhibit the graduating projects of the 2025 Master of Visual Studies graduate students Justyna Janik, Lauren Warrington, and Lina Wu. 

Justyna Janik is a cross-disciplinary artist based in Toronto. Her practice, spanning painting, sculpture, and video, explores the human body in relation to historical, social, and political contexts. Through the integration of disparate imagery and materials, she relies on randomness and chance to underscore the body’s vulnerability and fluidity. A current Master of Visual Studies candidate at the University of Toronto, she holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University and an Honours Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science from the University of Toronto.

Lauren Warrington is an artist from Saskatoon who works with sculpture and digital space. Her work is grounded in her experiences as a “mixed race” Chinese Canadian on the prairies and involves recontextualizing inherited histories into digital and physical forms. Through her practice, she reflects on embodied memory, oral histories, and ancestor rituals to consider what exists between assimilation and diaspora, between forgetting and remembering.

Lina Wu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto. Currently she works in figurative drawing, zines, and cartooning. Lina is invested in finding and unravelling the paradoxes inherent in constructions of sexuality, desire, and identity.

Please note: This exhibit contains lighting contrasts that may affect visitors with photosensitivity, epilepsy, or other light-triggered conditions. Viewer discretion may be advised. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to connect with the Art Museum at artmuseum@utoronto.ca or call 416-978-8398.

Careful Crossings

Curated by Abisola Oni

Careful Crossings proposes the values of care and connection as navigational tools towards liberatory destinations. The exhibition brings together artists whose experiences of travel inspire ethical relations in human geography. These movers tread expressive maps, tracing contours that unsettle forms of socio-spatial organization and global encounter that are inhospitable to life. Presented across three locations, the seven artists document their travel as a critical reflection of the geographical conditions of colonialism, imperial exploitation, and slavery. Where the experiences of familiarity and foreignness converge, the artists seek to make intimate connections to places of arrival and mindful reclamations of displaced histories.  

In the Interstices of Our Palms

Curated by Sophie Dubeau Chicoine 

The group exhibition In the Interstices of Our Palms explores ways to build, hold, and share community in times of disruption. Navigating the personal and collective challenges of communal efforts, three artists mobilize processes of (re)assembly. Through the use of fragile materials, arrangements or embodied forms, they expose their vulnerability to past and current upheavals that have shaken their communities. This exposure is coupled with resilience, an essential quality for ensuring the sustainability of their endeavors.

Whispers of Resistance

Curated by Sibei Du 

This exhibition critically examines the realities of Chinese women negotiating societal expectations and individual autonomy within a rapidly transforming socio-cultural landscape. Featuring four artists—Liu Xi, Anny Peng, Zhou Wenjing, and Cai Yaling—Whispers of Resistance examines the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, and intergenerational relationships, revealing both the constraints and courageous defiance embedded within these artists’ experiences. 

These exhibitions are produced as part of the requirements for the MVS degree in Studio Art and the MVS degree in Curatorial Studies at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

All images courtesy of the artists. 1) Lauren Warrington, To Form a Pearl (TAI.PO.AR.1931.002), 2025, ceramic, variable dimensions; 2) Lina Wu, Paradox Tear, 2025, pencil, watercolour on paper, 9 in x 12 in; 3) Justyna Janik, Foreign Tongues, 2024, oil on canvas, 24 in x 72 in x 1.5 in.