Critical Distance DIRECTORY Shani K Parsons

The Contingent Image comprises three large-scale wall-based assemblages of 170+ paintings selected from a series of over 250 panels. Following a decisive moment of artistic reckoning during which Climenhage destroyed a number of his own past works, the artist has painstakingly reworked, and later began piecing together, a new way to make painting out of this proverbial wreckage. Proliferating across the walls to encompass the viewer, the assemblages evoke the art historical sublime in their sheer scale and striking visuality. Yet this work was never intended as a grand gesture but rather has slowly accumulated through an intimate and ongoing process of search, recovery, and reflection in the wake of grief—and not just for that momentary lapse of faith in art, but as it became compounded by deep personal loss (the still-unsolved killing of close friend and long-time artistic collaborator Jeremy Gordaneer in 2021), and broader disheartenment at humanity’s capacity for destruction—at both individual and international scales. As such, The Contingent Image marks a moment of desire, akin to that of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed.” Against the storm that drives us “irresistibly into the future … while the rubble-heap [of catastrophe] … grows sky-high,”1 The Contingent Image synthesizes a lifetime of memory (the tragic, the magic, as well as the mundane), of observation and practice in painting, of relationships and conversations in the arts and beyond, of an enduring concern with issues of geopolitical import, and of a hard-won and finely-honed intuition—evincing a critical approach to improvisation that has become second nature to an artist who has not only painted for over 30 years but has also been a practicing musician for a decade longer. 

A cross-continental collaboration between Canadian artist Josée Pedneault (Montreal) and Mexican artist Alejandro Garcia Contreras (Mexico City), The New Gods is a Featured Exhibition of the 2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Featuring an extraordinary series of large-scale photographs, this project examines fantastical rites of spring that have emerged spontaneously within Carrillo Puerto, an isolated village in the mountains of Chiapas in southern Mexico.

Of other faces is a group exhibition featuring five artists whose works employ strategies of mirroring and doubling to investigate the paradoxical nature of our dualistic world. Through the representation or evocation of reflections, echoes, or iterations, the photographs, sounds, and videos of Andrea Cohen and Wiska Radkiewicz, Victoria Fu, Marta Ryczko, and Manuel Saiz interrogate, express, or reveal hidden contradictions within contemporary social systems as they relate to dualities of self and Other.

Featuring an immersive video installation and new limited edition photo series by Lyla Rye, Erratic Room is an exploration into spatial perception and its often hidden physical and psychological effects. Simultaneously delimiting and expanding the boundaries of the space it occupies, Erratic Room begets a similarly confounding effect upon our imaginations and memories. From our cloistered vantage point within the darkened room, the enveloping projections assume the form and function of apparitional windows on an unsettled world.