Miles Rufelds

Continuing April’s brave now selection, curated by Kate Wong, we highlight Miles Rufelds. Miles Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Toronto. He holds a Master’s of Visual Studies in Studio Art from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Ottawa. Rufelds’ research-based practice mixes archival investigation with strategies of speculative and para-fiction, considering how forms of narrativity mediate the effects of material power structures. His projects often focus on stories where histories of science, industry, labour, and war intersect with artistic, political, or esoteric subcultures. Rufelds has participated in exhibitions and screenings nationally and internationally, including the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Blackwood Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, VOX Contemporary Image Centre, PAVED Arts, the Karsh-Masson Gallery, the CICA Museum, and the SIM Gallery. Rufelds is a co-founder of Toronto gallery the plumb. His films are distributed by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Artist: Miles Rufelds (@milesrufelds ) Curator-in-Residence: Kate Wong (@katekmwong ) 📷: 1. Miles Rufelds. Photo courtesy of the artist. 2. Miles Rufelds, It’s Not Brakhage, HD video with sound, 00:54:39, 2024. 3. Miles Rufelds, A Hall of Mirrors, Custom-built lightboxes, transparency prints, 16mm film, books, documents, tweezers, fabric gloves, 2026. 4. Miles Rufelds, Salvage Archives, Video installation, 00:42:34, shipping pallets, leaves, vines, dirt, plastic door flaps, fluorescent lights, aluminum cages, 2025. Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery.

It's the final few days to see "A Hall of Mirrors" at @centre_vox in Montréal, closing this Saturday, March 28th. Final push to get the word out in case any Montréal friends haven't had a chance The upturned archival tableaux exists in a kind of scenographic dialogue with the feature-length essay/noir film, It's Not Brakhage, which is playing in the attached screening room. The film's daily start times are listed on VOX's website in case you want to watch it from the beginning

To any friends and colleagues in Montreal, A Hall of Mirrors is in its final stretch at @centre_vox -- open until March 28th! An archive show that is not an archive show, neo-noir-conspiracy research through art history, art history through military-industrial history, immersive scenography, the implosion of the desire for knowledge, etc etc etc

My solo exhibition A Hall of Mirrors is up at @centre_vox until March 28th -- entering its final stretch If you're in Montreal now's the time to stop by!

A Hall of Mirrors enters its final month at @centre_vox , up until March 28th.

I'm late to share this, but as part of A Hall of Mirrors at @centre_vox , we commissioned a text about the show by the brilliant writer and theorist Jon K Shaw. Jon K Shaw is an always-surprising interdisciplinary writer and thinker, and was one of the co-editors of a fantastic book called Fiction as Method (2017) that I had read through many times. I was thrilled when he expressed he was interested in writing about the show, and the essay is appropriately stealthy and thoughtful. You can read it on VOX's website

A Hall of Mirrors is up until March 28th at @centre_vox The culmination of an 8-year research/parafiction project, A Hall of Mirrors dramatizes a conflict between a genuine investigation and its own subversion and collapse. Daily screening times for the ~hour-long film are listed on VOX's website so you can plan your visit strategically if you wish... 🩻 This project was possible thanks to generous support from the @ontarioartscouncil

A Hall of Mirrors is now up at @centre_vox , on view until March 28th This is some very preliminary documentation I took right before leaving, processed mostly on the train home. They'll do for now, but proper documentation is forthcoming Sincere thanks to the team at VOX for welcoming me in Montreal so warmly and for all their incredible work in helping put this show together over the past 9 months. Special thanks to director/curator Marie J. Jean for inviting me to present the show + helping to curate this new iteration from a large, unwieldy body of work; the brilliant @dorian.e_b for helping work through countless practical and conceptual details (more work and help than i can summarize here); and @dearpm2001 and @johnedenplayer for being an unbelievable technical team. Also massive thanks to @hellolaurad for the profound labour of translating the subtitles for the 55-minute film into French A bit more broadly, sincere thanks to @pavedarts and @mr.wonderf.ul for showing interest in + support for earlier versions of the project in 2020 and 2023, respectively Plus thank you to everyone who has come out to the show -- as always please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any thoughts or questions, I'm always interested to hear

I'm very excited to share that I've got a new exhibition opening on January 15th at @centre_vox in Montréal, entitled A Hall of Mirrors The show revisits a long-building parafiction project, using a forensic investigation into a lost work by filmmaker Stan Brakhage as scaffolding for a wide-ranging exploration of art's Janus-face with military-industrial power + its uneasy involvement with the material structures of authoritative truth. Half museo-archival deconstruction, half noir-inspired psychodrama, it's the summative point of an 8-year run of research and iteration, and I'm extremely excited to see it open. It's my first solo show in Montréal, working with a gallery and team I've always admired enormously -- the show will run from January 15th to March 28th, come by if you're in town! I'll be heading to Montréal to install on the 8th, more information to come..

In the Room Alone (2025) foam core, balsa wood, LED lamp, electronics, metal shafts, gear motor, rubber thread, pine, steel pipes This kinetic sculpture comprises one half of my project for the CAFKA Biennial this past summer, alongside a ~50-minute film of the same name. The project was devised as a speculative response to a curious historical thread in Kitchener: a group of Spiritualists, organized around spirit medium Thomas Lacey, who conducted weekly or bi-weekly seances for decades between the 1930s and 1960s, concluding at the height of the Cold War. Lacey worked as an engineer by trade, which often filtered into the group's seances, whether through experiments with new technologies or inventions he'd designed to enhance spiritual sensitivity, or through channeled conversations with scientific figures, from the spirits of Thomas Edison and Francis Bacon to Martian spaceship captains. Throughout even these technical conversations, the group would often return to questions of political economy and material reformation, considering ways that combinations of spirit and technology could work towards a political order closer to socialist disarmament and peace. Like the film, the sculpture expands on this cluster of ideas, connecting Spiritualism's leftist roots in 1848 to the 1960s Cold War. The model was built following the plans of a 19th-century Canadian farmhouse -- similar to the kinds that would have housed early seances in Canada and the US. The room sits on a hidden rotating platform, while a balsawood table floats suspended in the centre, rotating at a staggered pace, powered by a second, visible motor. A muted reference to the Spiritualist practice of "table turning" is handed off to a conspicuous but inscrutable technological setup, performing and meditating on this curious occult/machine complex in miniature. Special thanks to the @ontarioartscouncil for their generous support. And sincere thank you to everyone who helped produce or came to the @cafkabiennial !

Proper documentation is forthcoming, but I was able to grab a few images of my new project, IN THE ROOM ALONE, during the CAFKA Biennial opening last weekend. It's installed in the (purportedly haunted) attic of the Schneider Haus Museum just outside of downtown Kitchener. In a site-specific sense, the project was inspired by a group of Spiritualists in Kitchener who met every week from the 1930s through the 1960s to conduct séances with spirit medium Thomas Lacey. By the end of their time together, in the mid-1960s, their discussions regularly focused on threats of nuclear warfare, political assassinations, and political-economic clashes that defined the Cold War. Listening back to audio recordings of these sessions, their discussions reveal a fascinating ideological clarity towards leftist goals—socialism, disarmament, equal rights, etc—couched in their ritual of community gathering and esoteric transcendence. Since Spiritualism's beginning in the 1840s, it was always wrapped up with leftist and progressive movements, from prison reform, women's rights, abolitionism, and socialism. The Lacey group's continuation of this tendency in the 1960s is interesting, though, as by then Spiritualism was well past its peak popularity. It's also a curious confluence, because at this same time, among the New Age era's renewed interest in occult activities, there were now concerted efforts within the US, Soviet, and Chinese militaries to explore the possibilities of historically esoteric phenomena. In the US specifically, many of the programs researching these subjects were funded by private capitalist interests (heirs to the DuPont or Astor families, wealthy inventors or financiers), pervesely inverting the movement's leftist history to serve imperial capitalist imperatives. IN THE ROOM ALONE mixes an analysis of this history with a thread of speculative fiction, jumping off from this peculiar Cold War episode to contemplate how forms of community, technology, political vision, and radical imagination combine to create new visions of the future, utopian or catastrophic Special thanks to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for generous support

Salvage Archives is in its final week at @kwartgallery -- the final day is Sunday the 25th Stop by if you're in the city 🚚 Curated by @doull Wonderful exhibition text by @angel_calendrier Photos by Toni Hafkensheid, courtesy of KWAG