Jeremy Laing

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Blind SpotArt Museum at the University of Toronto
May 7 to August 1, 2026 Curated by Georgia Liapi, featuring work by Shadi Habib Allah, Shu Lea Cheang, Jeremy Laing, Lou Sheppard, and Iris Touliatou.
A blind spot is the presence of a gap in a human’s visual field. It appears at arm’s length at the centre between one’s eyes. Yet, even though physically manifest, typically sighted individuals do not experience it because the brain creates an optical illusion to cover it up. It is an automatic brain function that fills in the absence with what the brain thinks should be there. 

The existence of the blind spot in human optics raises a foundational question of perspective: do we see the world directly, or do we experience a personally constructed representation of reality that conceals its own absences? In this context, I use the term “blind spot” as a metaphor and a method for an exhibition that condenses with the importance of paying careful attention to the conditions surrounding what is automatically perceived as given.

Blind Spot gathers the practices of Shadi Habib Allah (b. 1977, Palestine), Shu Lea Cheang (b. 1954, Taiwan), Jeremy Laing (b. 1979, Canada), Lou Sheppard (b. 1982, Canada), and Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece). Working across installation, performance, video, and digital interfaces, these five artists destabilize various sanctioned structures—the “default settings” of technological, medical, linguistic, and archival systems—to reorient perception toward what operates beneath the visible.

They seek out blind spots in common infrastructures, from software to cellular signals, through which subjectivities are experienced and normalized, exposing systematic gaps and suggesting ways to repurpose their functions toward more complex realities and new possibilities. The artworks emphasize processes requiring bodily engagement, prompting closer attention to what is considered a given, and to who and what generate the systems and technologies we encounter every day.
Jeremy Laing’s STOCKROOM v2.0 (2026) complicates spectatorship and presentation, exposing museum storage as an infrastructure, a spatial “blind spot” within the institution. Shadi Habib Allah’s video Did You See Me This Time With Your Own Eyes? (2018) reflects on how marginalized communities’ survival technologies are reclassified depending on the point of view of the observer or narrator. Lou Sheppard’s A Strong Desire (2019/26) is an installation and performance of a score based on the text of the diagnostic criteria that provides access to transition-related medical care, exposing the illogics of regulatory systems that disregard lived experience. Shu Lea Cheang’s UTTER (2023) is an AI portrait in the form of an endlessly mutating body, accompanied by the coded parameters that determine its mutations. The work is a critical intervention into gender and racial representation, revealing AI alignment as a contemporary technology of normativity. Iris Touliatou’s SCORE FOR TONE CHANGE (2023/26) is a software intervention for museum computers that replaces their default Oxford Dictionary with Cynthia Whissell’s Dictionary of Affect in Language, activating a daily practice of affect within the institution.

—Georgia Liapi
Images by LF Documentation, courtesy of Art Museum.

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