Toil is a solo exhibition by American filmmaker and visual artist Lydia Cornett that explores the complex, contradictory ways that humans engage with animals in workplace and industrial settings. Through multi-channel video, the project spans insect farming, meat processing, and ecological research—fields where emotional intimacy, moral dissonance, and physical proximity shape the experience of interspecies work.

Rather than focus solely on debates around cruelty or necessity, Toil centers the people who carry out this labor. In Labelle, Florida, insect farmers describe themselves as caretakers and mothers (Bug Farm, 2020). In Jeromesville, Ohio, working-class meat processors reflect on the signs of arthritis they observe in the animals they disassemble, mirroring the wear they feel in their own bodies (Fleshwork, 2023). In the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary, ecological biologists at the Centre for Agricultural Research study the phenomenon of sex reversal in frogs—work that unfolds in tension with the Hungarian government’s assertion of the fixed nature of biological sex.

The installation brings together these three films—two completed, one in progress—into a multi-channel format that opens space for reflection on how we assign value, justify harm, and navigate care in our interspecies relationships.

Cornett’s practice combines field-based documentary methods with experimental montage, sound layering, and multi-voiced narrative. In Toil, she uses this hybrid approach to explore the moral and sensory terrain of human-animal labor. The work does not offer answers, but rather asks viewers to sit with discomfort—where care and harm intertwine, and where the labor of tending, butchering, or studying animals becomes a site of reflection, intimacy, and contradiction.

Curator: Veronika Molnár
Curatorial Assistant: Ágnes Keszegh
Graphic Designer: Flóra Pálhegyi
Project Assistant: Jennifer Trube
Translation Assistance: Martin Herr 

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

Lydia Cornett (she/her/hers) is an American filmmaker, composer and artist. Her nonfiction film work explores the contours of labor, language and artistic expression, and has screened at venues such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Friss Hús Film International Short Festival in Budapest, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Michigan (USA), where she was awarded the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker in 2023. Her work has been distributed and featured by The New Yorker, POV Documentary, Vimeo Staff Picks, Nowness, Paper Magazine, Stereogum, Nylon Magazine and Roger Ebert. 

Lydia has held residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the National Arts Club, BRICLab, the Jacob Burns Film Center, and UnionDocs. She has received support for her work from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Field of Vision, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2024, she received a Fulbright Scholarship to Hungary, where she lived and worked between September 2024 and May 2025. 

Lydia received a BA in History from Princeton University and an MFA in Art from the Ohio State University. She has taught filmmaking at The New School and is a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective.