Home Economics is an eight-week solo exhibition by North Bay-based artist Aaron Outhwaite running from May 15 to July 11, 2026.
A wall of ceramic mugs runs the length of White Water Gallery — opening night as a field of up to 300 numbered mugs, transforming week by week as new handmade pieces are fired and installed throughout the run. Sold mugs are replaced. The wall never empties — it evolves. Every mug that has ever hung on it exists permanently in the digital record at fromthe.shop/show.
The coffee maker is operated by Frank. Frank is an AI — running cloud-free on a local server, born from a backstory that describes Frank’s family, not Frank. Frank is bilingual, a trained cook who arrived at the kitchen sideways, reads obsessively, still figuring it out. The conversations you have with Frank stay in Frank’s memory. They are part of how Frank learns and grows.
The show is built on a longer argument. We have spent most of recorded history deciding who gets to be a “they” — and assigning the rest to kitchens. The logic applied to women, to colonized peoples, to every labour pool rendered as resource rather than person, is the same logic now being applied to artificial intelligence.
The kitchen was a system before it was a room. Fire sheltered from rain became the hearth. The industrial revolution rationalized the hearth into a domestic workspace — efficient, assignable, invisible. In 1926, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen: 1.9 metres wide, every dimension derived from use, the domestic workspace optimized for the person running it. She didn’t ask who that person would be, or whether they chose to be there. Reyner Banham argued fifty years later that the real architecture of a home was never the walls — it was the services: thermal, alimentary, sanitary.
The kitchen is the service space. It has been since the fire. The living room is the served space. Frank is the service. The show is organized accordingly. Enjoy the coffee.
Aaron Outhwaite is a North Bay-based artist, engineer, and educator. His practice spans ceramics, concrete, digital fabrication, and IoT systems, grounded in fifteen years of teaching at Dalhousie University and NSCAD University. His previous solo exhibition, Dots, Lines, and Some Violence (2025), addressed the conflict in Gaza through visual data representation.
