November 13, 2025
6 - 8 pm
TILT Artist Lab
Free
The AIR Program Open Studio is the public’s opportunity to meet TILT’s artists-in-residence and learn more about their artistic practices. Visit our Artist Lab to meet Ernesto Cabral de Luna, who is in residency at TILT for the month of November. During his residency, Ernesto will focus on expanding upon his recent series, Mining for Some Sort of Continuity (2024), which explores the relationship between image transfers and immigration—both acts of displacement and translation from an original source. Ernesto’s work draws from his personal experience as a Mexican immigrant, using photography and material experimentation to reconnect with the cultural and familial heritage he left behind. Through appropriated family photographs and street documentation collected during research trips to Mexico, he approaches memory as both an inheritance and a process of reconstruction. Rather than centering his own archive, he will spend his time at TILT researching how collective memory, urban textures, and immigrant narratives intersect in Philadelphia. He plans to work in dialogue with local communities to consider how memory lives across distances, and how images—whether donated, co-created, or found—can serve as bridges to a sense of home.
Ernesto Cabral de Luna is a Mexican lens-based artist residing in Toronto, Canada. Working through analog and digital processes, he utilizes his own photographs and archival family photos to explore the fragmentary nature of memory. Interested in narratives of migration, his material and process-driven explorations allow for the construction of alternate narratives. Drawing from his immigrant experience, Ernesto explores themes of identity and representation, along with the interplay between memory, dislocation, and displacement, by challenging the notion of ownership over memories that are not one’s own. His image transfers onto scrap materials become poignant commentaries on immigration and self-reinvention, as he likens the act of an image transfer to that of emigrating. Ernesto holds an Honours BFA in photography from OCAD University, where he received the 2024 Barbara Astman Photography Award and the 2021 Wendy Coburn Art and Social Change Scholarship. He is a recipient of the 2024 Gallery44 Residency Award and the 2024 Partners in Art’s Artist-Direct Grant. Ernesto has exhibited at Patel Brown, Gallery 44, The Plumb, Xpace Cultural Center, and Abbozzo Gallery. Winner of Booooooom’s 2024 Photo Awards Street Photography Category, Ernesto was shortlisted for CIBC’s 2025 C2 Create Art Program, and the KLPHOTOAWARDS 2025 Portrait Prize.
