A coming together of stories, gestures, and offerings made amidst transience. At its core, this exhibition explores what it means to make space for one another, for joy and collective healing within systems not always designed to bear the entirety of us.

Born from a yearlong residency with the City of Ottawa’s Integrated Neighbourhood Services Team, this body of work holds the weight of displacement and the radical potential of community. It is not a showcase of solutions, but a mapping of the tender moments that make doing the work feel whole: a note left in a flower, a shared meal, a voice pinned to a map, the feeling of being held. Here, art functions not as decoration, but as record-keeping. Each piece, a portal, opening into histories often unrecorded and futures still being imagined. Drawing from ancestral symbols, tactile rituals, and community dialogue, In Bloom resists the neatness of documentation. The works speak instead in overlaps and absences; it exists in the space between what is visible and what can only be felt. The faceless figures, motifs, and repetition of grids and circles evoke the tension between institutional structure and lived experience. And yet, across these tensions, something softer persists: connection, presence, the insistence that we not only survive, but can and do reach for joy and change even in seemingly impossible circumstances.

This is an exhibition about how we gather, how we care, how we remember. It asks not only who is present, but who has been made room for, and who is still waiting to be invited in.