In Between Lights

artLAB Gallery, Department of Visual Arts, Western University

Ursula Handleigh, Banig, Woven Silver Gelatin Prints, 2023 – Present

In Between Lights
Julia Rose Sutherland | Michael Flomen | Ursula Handleigh

Curated by Yijing Li, Ph.D. Candidate
July 9 – 23, 2026
Reception: Thursday, July 9, 5 – 7pm
artLAB Gallery, London

Yijing writes:

To think through the relationship between light and photography, this exhibition approaches photography not as a medium that captures time, but as a practice that translates it. Through photography, time becomes perceptible through traces, exposures, accumulations, and material transformations that resist fixity. The image becomes less a record of what was than an encounter with what continues to unfold.

In the artworks of Ursula Handleigh, Julia Rose Sutherland, and Michael Flomen, light no longer serves merely to reveal what already exists. Instead, it becomes an active participant in the formation of the image, allowing time to take material form. In Handleigh’s Banig, sunlight gives rise to photographic images that continue to unfold through weaving, where labour and material become integral to the passage of time. In Julia Rose Sutherland’s artwork, light carries family photographs onto hand-peeled birch bark, deer hide, and beadwork, where memory is continually rearticulated rather than preserved unchanged. In Flomen’s cameraless photograms, the bioluminescent movements of fireflies accumulate across photosensitive surfaces, transforming fleeting moments into luminous traces that register duration rather than instantaneity. Rather than treating light as a tool for fixing the world, these works remain attentive to its capacity to sustain processes of change. The photographs therefore cease to function as stable records of a singular moment and instead become sites where time, memory, and material continue to unfold together.

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Julia Rose Sutherland, Ala’toq “carry with you.” Photo transfer on birch bark, deer hide and beads, 2026

About the Curator

Yijing Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture (Curatorial Stream) at Western University. Her current research examines how light translate time through alternative photography and how to present this in exhibition. Her published work includes Family Portraits: The reconstruction of “Family Time” Through Generations and Brushstrokes: Rethinking Originality in Chinese Calligraphy through Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Aura. Alongside her research, she has curated a series of exhibitions that investigate photography, materiality, and ecological approaches to curating.

About the Artists

Julia Rose Sutherland (She/They) is a storyteller, interdisciplinary artist, and assistant professor at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada. She is a half-settler and half-Indigenous and is a citizen of the Mi’kmaq (Metepenagiag Nation). With a foundation in craft, new media, and sculpture, Sutherland’s work spans diverse media and thematic concerns, exploring identity, cultural memory, and the politics of representation.

Ursula Handleigh (she/her) is a Tkaronto Scarborough-born artist and educator of Filipinx/a/o mixed-ancestry working within expanded photography, moving image and alternative processes of image making. Handleigh is currently an Assistant Professor at OCAD University. While challenging traditional methods of documentation, Handleigh’s practice explores questions of identity and how the role of memory, ancestral knowledge and storytelling can be used to reconstruct archives and preserve histories.

Michael Flomen making photographs in the late sixties and has been showing his work on several continents since 1972. He served as a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists, including for the Jacques Henri Lartigue travelling exhibition that toured Canada and the United States in the mid seventies.

Michael Flomen, Summer Number Two, Edition 13, Gelatin silver toned prints, 44 x 136 in, 2020

About the Gallery

Located in the John Labatt Visual Arts Centre at Western University, the artLAB Gallery and Cohen Commons, are vital facilities within the Department of Visual Arts. Our primary focus is to act as a pedagogical tool, to support student and faculty-led research and production. Exhibitions provide a platform to respond to pertinent social and cultural issues, and/or explore conceptual, formal and material-based interests. Able to accommodate a wide range of media, both the artLAB and Cohen Commons provide space for professionalization, as well as experimental approaches to exhibition making.

Western University is located on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak, and Neutral (Chonnonton) peoples, on lands connected to several Treaties including Treaty 6 London Township, Treaty 7 Sombra Township, Treaty 21 Longwoods and the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. This place continues to be home to diverse Indigenous peoples who are recognized as contemporary stewards of the land and vital contributors to society.

2. Light carries family photographs onto hand-peeled birch bark, deer hide, and beadwork, where memory is continually rearticulated rather than preserved unchanged.
3. Fireflies become collaborators in image-making, allowing light to trace the passage of time across photogram.