In September 2022, I showed AI-generated art in a converted horse stable accessed through a back laneway in Toronto. The gallery was Gagné Contemporary. The show was called IN/HUMAN. And at the time, most people I talked to still weren't sure if what I was making counted as art.
I exhibited alongside Jason Theodor and Jon Toews — three of us working independently with AI image generation tools that were, at that point, barely a year into the public consciousness. The theme asked a big question about technology, creativity, and what it means to be human. We each answered it differently.
My pieces ranged from the deliberately playful to the genuinely ambitious. A series of abstract liquid paintings used AI to emulate the fluid motion of ballet dancers — trying to find grace inside a system that didn't really understand bodies yet. "Miewsings" was exactly what it sounds like: a series prompted by my cat walking across the keyboard, leaning into the randomness of early generation tools and treating the accidents as creative input. On the other end, I showed a set of retro-futuristic posters and a utopian landscape called "Solarpunk Treehouse" — pieces where I was pushing the tools toward something with real intentionality and atmosphere.
The show mattered to me for a few reasons. It was one of the first physical exhibitions of AI art in Toronto, which meant the audience was arriving with genuine curiosity and very few preconceptions. People who came in skeptical left engaged. The conversations that happened in that laneway gallery — about authorship, about craft, about where the human ends and the machine begins — were exactly the ones I wanted to be part of.
IN/HUMAN was also where I started finding my voice with these tools. Not just figuring out what AI could do, but figuring out what I wanted to say with it. The cat pieces and the ballet pieces came from completely different impulses, but showing them side by side helped me understand that range was the point. The technology was a medium, not a gimmick. The exhibition became an early milestone — both in my own practice and in the larger, still-unfolding story of AI as a creative tool.
Photo credit: Dean Tomlinson