Critical Distance Media drawing / painting-based practices

With an emphasis on play, Dee Dee Decay works with sculpture, performance, video, and the tender processing of materials. The close relationship they hold with their grandmother directly informs their practice through manual labor, slowness, repetition, and care, whether they find themselves at the metal studio or by claybeds of the Humber River. For Dee, creating from a land-based practice becomes the connective tissue that brings together their cultural investigations and reverence of death in the form of a tangled fruit net. This past year, they’ve developed an affinity for white swiftlets and the unique nature of their nests. Ongoing research explores colonial histories in South Asia and their personal experiences with homebuilding and migration. Dee is a queer Chinese-Viet…Find out more

Xinyi Tian is a Chinese artist who currently base in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in 2D animation, character design, and illustration, and holds a BFA in Experimental Animation from OCAD University (2025). Xinyi’s work focuses on expressing emotions, character movement, and abstract morphing through vibrant colors, multimedia techniques, and simple yet striking designs. She often works with digital animations, puppet stop-motion and cut-paper animation to bring imaginative worlds to life. Her artistic goal is to collaborate with other creatives on animation projects exploring themes of time, space, fantasy, and personal growth. Looking ahead, She hopes to deepen her exploration of narrative animation and experiment with interactive digital media to uncover new ways of blending storytelling with experimental techniques.Find out more

John Climenhage is a painter. In conversation with poets, philosophers, fellow painters, and other artists over his 30+ year career, he has engaged in concerted formal and conceptual exploration and creation of charged and abstracted spaces en plein air as well as in-studio, that are deeply informed by current socio-political conditions and events, both local and global. Even before the 2015 release of the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) report made soberingly clear the implications of landscape painting in Canada (specifically how the painterly capture of “wild spaces” can serve to mirror and amplify the deleterious impacts of the doctrine of Terra nullius), Climenhage was exploring different kinds of space in painting beyond direct representation. Informed by a longstanding interest…Find out more

Amin Alsaden is a curator, scholar, and educator whose work focuses on transnational solidarities and exchanges across cultural boundaries. His curatorial practice is committed to advancing social justice through the arts, and to disseminating more inclusive narratives that decenter existing canons and challenge hegemonic epistemological and power structures. His exhibitions invariably raise questions concerning the interrelated domains of geography, colonialism, extraction, organized violence, and displacement.

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Swapnaa Tamhane is an artist and curator, working between Canada and India. Her visual practice extends to decolonizing distinctions between art, craft, and design, while her curatorial practice is focussed on the wider South-Asian diaspora and contemporary art from India.

Tamhane graduated with a BA in Art History from Carleton University, Ottawa, an MA in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester, and an MFA in Fibres & Material Practices from Concordia University, Montreal. She has been a Research Fellow with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (2009) and an International Museum Fellow with the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (2013). She has held positions as an Editor at Phaidon Press, London (2002-2006), an Assistant Curator at The Power Plant (2007-2008), Toronto, and a Producer of Contemporary Art Projects at Luminato Festival (2016).

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