Dig Up My Heart:

June 19-July 18, 2026
Opening Reception:  June 19, 2026, 7-9pm
Solo Exhibition by Job Piston

co-presented with Factory Media Centre


The works in Dig Up My Heart emerge through a process of excavation, both material and psychological. Borrowed from Canadian “The Peoples Poet” Milton Acorn, whose writing explored themes of love, death, labor, and working-class life, the show evokes associative thinking informed by poetry and psychoanalysis, where fragmented narratives dissolve as quickly as they appear. Ancient landscapes of abandoned Greek figures sit alongside formal portraits of living artists, both serve as the backdrop to a sculptural installation made of locally salvaged steel and automotive parts from Hamilton’s industrial yards. Human time is placed against geological and industrial time, where memory, intimacy, decay, and regeneration unfold in vastly different scales.



Job Piston (b. Detroit, Michigan) is an artist, curator, and artistic director based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across photography, exhibition design, and installation, his practice explores intimacy, pleasure, grief, and social alienation through cinematic image-making and psychologically charged environments. Piston has presented solo exhibitions and projects at the California Museum of Photography, For Freedoms, Jessica Silverman Gallery, and Charlie James Gallery. He has realized two site-specific domestic installations at Villa Madrid, Los Angeles, 2022-2024. Selected group exhibitions include Artists Space, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Roberts Projects, Louis B. James Gallery, and Galerie Dohyang Lee. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Since 2017, Piston has served as a curator for the Performa Biennial, commissioning live performances by visual artists for their first time. Piston was a curatorial fellow at ARCAthens and RAD Art Fair Bucharest, and an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. He received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.


Factory Media Centre is Hamilton’s not-for-profit artist-driven resource centre for film, video, new media, installation, sound art, and other multimedia art forms. Our mission is to develop and support a vibrant, sustainable, creative, and diverse community of Members and non-Members within Hamilton and its surrounding region.


This exhibition is made possible thanks to generous funding from the incite Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit organization dedicated to revolutionizing support for the arts in the Hamilton Community.

Crown Point East. Hamilton, ON