Opening reception UnRuly: Counter-Archiving Women’s Reform, an exhibition of student work at Fabrik Architects.
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025
Time: 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: Forum at Fabrik Architects
UnRuly: Counter-Archiving Women’s Reform
I do not intend to speak about; just speak nearby—Trinh T. Minh-ha, Reassemblage
The archive of the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women preserves the official record of Canada’s first women’s reformatory. Its plans, disciplinary registers, and medical assessments were designed to document order and progress, yet they also disclose absences, tensions, and marks of lived experience. Beneath the rhetoric of reform lay a carceral institution, and daily life inside reflected that reality. From these documents, the contours of the institution emerge. Opened in 1880 in Toronto, the Mercer formed part of a wider network of women’s reform institutions that claimed to offer protection and training. In practice, it entrenched gendered, racial, and class norms, enacted through bureaucratic procedures that produced their own forms of violence. Many women and girls were incarcerated for perceived moral transgressions rather than criminal offences, and the Mercer became a testing ground for new practices in social work, psychiatry, and classification. This exhibition anchors itself in the archive, tracing both its disciplinary force and the agency, refusals, and everyday acts of those whose lives it sought to contain.