We are standing on a ledge. Every day, the ground beneath us shifts—books banned, bodies legislated, histories rewritten. What once felt unthinkable now feels inevitable. In the US, art and empathy are under siege, stripped of funding, dignity, and protection. A new authoritarian language cloaked in morality and order dominates. Corporations write policy while government enforces profit, weaponizing faith, fear, and misinformation to consolidate control. The machinery of fascism hums quietly beneath daily life, normalizing cruelty. As culture narrows and humanity is systematically stripped from public life, we must shift our gaze to new horizons.

“Looking Up” begins here, in this moment of contraction, as both gesture and refusal. It looks northward and skyward—toward our neighbor above and toward reprieve. To look up is to search for air when the atmosphere turns toxic, to imagine a vantage point beyond surveillance, fear, and control. The title plays on direction and aspiration: looking to Canada not as a promised land, but as a mirror held against what we are becoming. The exhibition gathers Canadian-born artists whose work spans continents and mediums, using their perspective to show that another orientation is possible. “Looking Up” is both direction and necessity—a way to imagine something else when the ground beneath us feels hostile.

Canada serves as a mirror for our unraveling. The US clings to the melting-pot myth, a story of assimilation as unity. Canada, by contrast, asserts a coexistence of distinct parts—a cultural mosaic. Between these metaphors lies a fault line: one built on domination, the other on negotiation. “Looking Up” uses that tension as its compass, asking what kind of collective future we might imagine when systems collapse. To look north is to consider plurality—valuing fragments rather than forcing them to fuse.

This is not an exhibition about geography; it is about survival through perspective. “Looking Up” meditates on orientation—how we find direction when every moral and political compass feels broken. To look up now is to resist despair. A small, deliberate motion—a tilt of the head—insists on possibility even when the sky feels unreachable. “Looking Up” reclaims that gesture as metaphor and method: a way of staying human when systems built on profit and fear would rather we look down and submit.

Ultimately, “Looking Up” proposes the exhibition as a collective act of resistance. The participating Canadian-born artists illuminate what it means to live near a superpower in moral free fall. In a time when truth is negotiated through propaganda, empathy is mistaken for weakness, and silence is rewarded with safety, to look up is to reject the narrative that there is no alternative. It is a gesture of solidarity across borders, a reminder that the sky above is shared even when the ground beneath fractures. “Looking Up” doesn’t promise answers; it creates space for breath, imagination, and connection at the edge of collapse, asking what becomes possible when we lift our gaze together—not to escape what’s below, but to envision what might still be rebuilt above it.