Morgan Mavis curates spaces that blur the boundaries between art, nature, and museology, exploring how we collect, display, and engage with the non-human world. For over a decade, she has led OCAD University’s Ignite Gallery, curating diverse exhibitions that champion emerging artists and contemporary practices. She has established Ignite as a dynamic platform for installation-based art, providing emerging artists with an experimental space to exhibit and reinvasion their work.
Mavis spent eight years curating The Contemporary Zoological Conservatory (CZC) was a performance art natural history museum that blurred the lines between archive, obsession, and spectacle. She curated a space where wonder and unease intertwine—where the natural world was not just observed but confronted.
The CZC was not a place of quiet observation. It was an accumulation, a home museum, an accretion of taxidermy, a living record of collecting itself. Mavis cataloged the impulse to preserve, to possess, to tell stories through the artifacts of the wild. The collection grew beyond its walls, not just in physical scale but in the conversations it sparked about museology, ethics, and the aesthetics of nature.
With an MFA in Museum Studies from the University of Toronto and a BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCAD University, she navigates the intersections of exhibtion, research, and creative practice. She also taught graduate exhibitions at the University of Toronto, mentoring students in curatorial practices and exhibition design.
For project inquiries contact: [email protected]