Akash Inbakumar
March 11 - April 18, 2026
Reception: Wednesday, March 11 from 6-8pm
Performance by Akash Inbakumar: Saturday, March 28 from 2-3pm
Craft Ontario Gallery, 401 Richmond St West, Suite 108, Toronto
‘When I Ebb and Wax’ is a solo exhibition by Toronto-based artist Akash Inbakumar that brings together installation, textile, and performance works from two bodies of work: ‘Era of the Moon’ and ‘Tug’. Across these works, rope, velvet, and dyed cloth are transformed into sculptural forms that hold tension, weight, and the imprint of repeated action.
Lengths of rope coil and gather into dense surfaces, suggesting both nets and knots. Velvet is crushed and marked, its surface shifting between softness and rupture. Indigo-dyed textiles carry subtle impressions of movement and time. These materials bear witness to processes of pulling, binding, and release — gestures that speak to persistence, exhaustion, and the fragile promise of change.
The exhibition takes its title from the cyclical movement of tides and lunar phases. Just as the moon passes through states of fullness and absence, these works trace the ongoing process of becoming and unbecoming. In ‘Tug’, the figure of a fisher is caught in an act of perpetual striving, bound to the object of their desire. In ‘Era of the Moon’, textile surfaces evoke the quiet rhythm of emergence and retreat, where transformation unfolds gradually, through repetition.
Throughout the exhibition, materials behave as extensions of the body. Fibres stretch and resist. Surfaces accumulate evidence of labour. Change appears not as a single decisive moment, but as something incremental and continuous.
‘When I Ebb and Wax’ is a meditation on endurance — on the forces that pull us forward, hold us in place, and shape who we become over time.
Akash Inbakumar is a Tamil-Singalese Canadian artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Their interdisciplinary practice uses installation, costumes, and performance to explore ideas of world-bulding, mythology, and kinship; entering partnerships with multiple mediums, tools, and processes, they conceive material-kin. These kin represent a world where craft objects play the role of carrying family lineage and storyteller, compared to the colonial west’s nuclear family. Queering the idea of how information can be passed down multi-generational/multi-species networks.
Inbakumar is a recent graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design University and has shown work at Articulé (Montréal), Kyoto City Art Museum (Kyoto), ArtAdress (Oakville) The Robert Mclaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), Artscape Gibraltar Point (Toronto), Patel Brown Gallery (Toronto), and Xpace Cultural Centre (Toronto).
Banner photo by Emi Takahashi.
Additional photos by Jimmy Limit, courtesy of the Art Gallery of Burlington.
