The Brooklyn Rail

Union Station, a Palladian, tier 1 heritage space that prohibits significant building alteration, is a local, regional, and national transportation hub, home for the unhoused, thirty retailers, and a confluence of 300,000 people a day. I entered the space as a traveler who came specifically to view art via the Union Pearson Express (UP) train. After disembarking, I was ushered into a corridor that opened into the Oak Room. That is where I first saw TD Bank signage and a lounge for cardholders, which then merged into the West Wing. Because of the socioeconomic convergences in the space, there’s a collision of multiple (sometimes competing) interests and an inherent choreography within its walls.

Despite these various factors, Osmington Inc., which runs the art programming at Union Station, champions the station as a cultural destination. To mitigate these factors, they invite premier Toronto-based galleries to curate the space, which, in this case, held up a mirror to the stakeholders involved, the unpredictability that occurs from gathering in a shared space, the station itself, and human behavior. As Canada celebrates Black History Month for the thirtieth year, the Union team used the heritage month’s designated funds to approach Black Artists’ Network in Dialogue (BAND) Gallery to produce an exhibition that celebrates cultural diversity called A Kind of Order.

A Kind of Order, curated by Joséphine Denis, Director of Curatorial Initiatives at BAND Gallery, recontextualizes a phrase used by Toronto’s third Poet Laureate Dionne Brand to explore how collage mimics the movement and advertising language of the station. To explore questions such as, “What does it mean to gather the artists in a space that has multiple functions where art may not be the primary focus?”, Denis creates a mostly non-figurative arrangement of collage which evokes the complex layering and subtractive and additive dimensions of being part of a diaspora, making Toronto Union an ambient force or character within the work. What is unique to Denis’s take is that she scaffolds the viewer’s experience: the surface layer evokes curiosity, the second highlights its aesthetic contributions to the space, and the third focuses on the conceptual with varying layers of access. The show does not flatten its theoretical depth despite being present in a public space. There are moments that feel like inside information—if you know, you know—which feels like what Denis calls a “refusal of total access,” an important notion for Black artists to embrace so that they can create their own enclave while in plain sight. Their intervention maintains radicality for that reason.

The first work viewers encounter is outside, a multi-strip banner in between the columns of the Neoclassical entrance. Camouflaged as promotional signage for the show, an abundant grammar in Union Station, Lazarus Contained (2026) by Aaron Jones shows a microcosm of an individual’s life as told through their possessions, frozen in time. It showcases a tank littered with the artist’s everyday things, such as toys and figurines, resting on a branch over an icy waterfront. The surrealist scene echoes the mythology of returning home or to an environment like Union Station that is perpetually in flux.

In the West Wing, a beige monochromatic atrium repeats the columnar form, is Cross Section (2026) by Timothy Yanick Hunter. Cross Section displays an accumulation of images that he gathered from the Toronto Public Library Digital Archive. His imagery encases the pillars as static portraits and one looping video that mimics the movement of what the images might have been in nature. A few steps away from the columns in the middle of the atrium is a double-sided plinth with a vinyl collage of detailed shots of sand, ants, larvae, particulate matter, and a singular figurative image on the front of the plinth with what looks to be Black women telephone operators coalesce. Yanick Hunter even exposes the white margins and scientific text of the work to reveal the artist’s hand of processing many analog photos and synthesizing them, which he describes as “sampling and splicing.”

There’s even a sense of loss and discovery, according to the curator’s didactics, in how “Pixelation suggests the work is constantly returning its own frequency to the motion it trades. The grain reads like calibration: information coming into focus, stepping out again, being in motion rather than settling into certainty.” He translates analog photos into digital, which makes them lose resolution and adds to their allure and mysticism. But again, his work appeals to folks of all backgrounds with his layering, although he shared an anecdote that a Black woman approached him, expressing pride that he made it to Union Station. She asked if there were ways for her granddaughter to take classes or learn from him. This affirms that, in many ways, the exhibition feels like a community milestone.

Untitled (Making Undevelopment) (2026) by Thato Toeba is another study of photography and material culture. The Lesotho-born artist and lawyer is interested in the ways that the idea of truth is framed and how narratives are presented to us. Toeba’s massive site-specific intervention is a collaboration with the Toronto Union fabrication team, realized by exchanging renderings and instructions. Together, the Union team and Toeba constructed a collage with figural cutouts, vinyl replicating the oak that frames them, and plexiglass mirrors in the shape of people inside the outlines that allow passersby to see themselves and become a part of the work.

This multilayered lens, interpolated by the artist, comes from their research in documentary photography across the Global South. There, this genre of photography has been used as a tool for acquiring international aid, manipulating perception, and encouraging intervention in which the Canadian International Bank and World Bank were active participants. Toeba, who grew up in a rural development started in 1976 by those two global entities, uses the arrangement of photos around three monumental cutouts, based on Lesotho-born Mohlouoa Ramakatane’s images of military personnel and the country’s former king, to tell this story.

Installing the work in a public space brings a unique transparency to the process of installation. In this case, since Untitled (Making Undevelopment) was the last work to be installed, I noticed that the collage did not come pre-cut. Instead, the installation team cut out the figures to create the silhouettes. I saw all of the figurative cutouts and asked what was going to be done with them to which they responded that Toeba would repurpose them. Their gap echoed the missingness of the Global South from the conversations in the West.

While Toeba engages in citational ethics of photographers, which may not appear to the naked eye, their interpolation of images, framing, and holding up a mirror to the passerby is a very effective strategy. By arranging the photographs surrounding the cutouts with an image from a National Geographic magazine of a couple kissing from the 1990s in Botswana, a gold miner, Santu Mofokeng’s wedding photography, or David Goldblatt’s images of South Africans going to work at the mines in the morning during Apartheid, for example, Toeba asserts that the history of photography and especially “black-and white images have had a political posture,” noting photography’s archival nature and history have been used to justify international development.

In a high-traffic hallway leading to the food court are Hazelle Palmer’s Japanese paper and hand-stencil collages rendered in vinyl: Gone (2025), Waiting (2025), The Drummer (2021), Disco Drag (2021), and The Seller (2025). These works transpose the density, pattern, and color of an African marketplace onto Union Station. All of the scenes are solitary figures, rendered with phenotypically African features, where pattern and color interplay. They draw from her travels to Ghana and her nostalgia for pre-COVID gatherings. Seeing the facial expressions of the figures in each collage made me think about a type of refusal to give the viewer access to their interior. Another aspect of the collages that only certain viewers will be able to decode are the details of multiple African patterns that contain adinkra symbols. To an outsider, it looks like color blocking and pattern mixing. To an insider, it reflects Afrocentric sartorialism.

As a child of the diaspora and collage enthusiast, I read A Kind of Order as an exhibition that brings attention to the rhythm in the chaos of pedestrian scrambles of Union Station (affectionately known as the “salmon run”), but I also understood that “order” could function as a paradigm, mission, group, or secret society (i.e., United Order of Tents) in this show. While that may not be the curator’s intention, it is clear to me that the secrecy of how things get done within the public sphere can become a strategy for the arts. Toronto Union, as a venue and collaborator, opens this possibility by positioning itself as the incubator for this idea through non-traditional display.