Fragments of mirrored glass split, gather light, and then come together as a new, luminous whole within the storied, century-and-a-half-old rooms of Toronto’s Spadina Museum. Built in 1866, the historic mansion currently serves as the site-specific canvas for interdisciplinary artist Ry Van Der Hout, whose intricate sculptures capture light to open fresh ways of seeing, feeling, and hearing local family lore. Titled In Broken Light, the exhibition opened at the museum on August 26 and runs through October 18, offering visitors a profound meditation on memory, architecture, and transformation.
Curated by Adrien Sun Hall, the exhibition explores deeply personal and historical themes through physical interventions across the sprawling, multi-story estate. “At the heart of In Broken Light is the understanding that shattering isn’t the end of a story—it’s the beginning of a new narrative,” Hall explains.
According to the curator, Van Der Hout begins their sculptural practice with deliberate acts of breaking, shattering glass and mirrors only to painstakingly solder them back together using traditional Tiffany stained-glass techniques. These meticulously mended surfaces serve as powerful metaphors for queer becoming and personal transformation. The resulting fractures function as apertures through which overlooked histories emerge, effectively transforming the sculptures into contemporary reliquaries dedicated to lives both remembered and forgotten.
Spanning the mansion’s four stories, five distinct sculptural interventions incorporate photography, stained glass, and mirrors. Each piece responds directly to the specific architecture and mood of the room it occupies, drawing on extensive research and conversations with spiritual leaders, family descendants, historians, museum guides, and conservators. The former resident families of Spadina Museum have supplied ample inspiration for the project, their real-life histories ranging from forbidden love to tragic illness, proving once again that domestic archives are often stranger than fiction.
The exhibition’s journey begins in unexpected places, reaching deep into the building’s infrastructure. In the basement’s preserved archaeological dig site, a fractured disco ball spins slowly to a NASA-produced audio track, casting an intricate, shifting mosaic of light onto rugged stone walls and infilled windows. This subterranean installation sets a contemplative, celestial tone for the rest of the house, blending historical excavation with contemporary media.
Moving upward, visitors encounter works like Tiber, a stained-glass sculpture printed with photographs of Tiber, a historical interpreter at the museum. Van Der Hout shattered and reassembled the piece, crafting it from a reclaimed antique dressing-table mirror holder found serendipitously in a dumpster right outside their studio.
Reflecting on the serendipitous discovery, Van Der Hout notes, “It felt like I got pulled into this story of an object guiding you to tell you that you are in the right place.”
Perhaps the most monumental intervention in the exhibition is Open Wing Death, the largest work on display. Installed on the unrestored third floor of the Spadina Museum, the piece takes the form of a 12-foot-high ovoid geodesic dome. The third floor itself carries a heavy historical footprint; added in 1913 as a sunlit sanctuary and recovery space for a resident suffering from tuberculosis, the area later housed the household’s domestic staff. Van Der Hout’s dome is dedicated to these often-overlooked workers.
Encountering the piece is an interactive and psychological experience. Before peering inside the dome, visitors catch stray, fragmented glimpses of themselves in the mirrored facets at various angles. For a split second, viewers may find themselves appearing as a total stranger, seen as if through someone else’s eyes, before personal recognition sets in and grounds them back in the present moment.
Through these careful interventions, In Broken Light bridges the gap between the rigid domestic history of a Victorian-era home and the fluid, evolving identities of the present day. By taking what was once broken and mending it by hand, Van Der Hout breathes new life into the silent corridors of the Spadina Museum, inviting every visitor to reconsider how past fractures continue to illuminate the modern world.
In Broken Light is on view at Spadina Museum in Toronto until October 18.
