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Shani K Parsons

Since the mid-90s, Shani K Parsons has pursued a multidisciplinary practice focused on exhibition-making — initially through the lenses of architecture, urban planning and public arts administration, then installation, graphic, and environmental design, and most recently through research, writing, curation, and collaboration.

In the process she has produced an eclectic body of work ranging from intimate book works and publications to immersive installations and exhibitions for venues including the American Museum of Natural History, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Rhode Island School of Design and RISD Museum, the Museum of Chinese in America (MoCA NY), and Mixed Greens, a contemporary art gallery in Chelsea.

After nearly a decade of living and working in New York, Shani moved to Toronto with her family. Bringing together her experience in the various aspects of exhibition-making — as artist, designer, critic, and curator — she is building in Critical Distance a hybrid space for collaborative and cross-disciplinary experimentation, an independent venue for exhibitions on all forms of local and international contemporary culture.

Image: Claritas, velvet and wood from FLIGHTS & LANDINGS (installation view), site-specific installation in the north stairwell at Artscape Youngplace, 2015.

EVENT: Slipstreams | Program for in/future Festival

September 17, 2016 - September 20, 2016
Artist(s): Morehshin Allahyari, Maria Flawia Litwin, Manuel Saiz, Marianna Milhorat, and Terence Nance Curator(s): Shani K Parsons Slipstreams, an original 30-min program of moving image works, will screen in the Cinesphere at Ontario Place during in/future, an immersive celebration of multidisciplinary contemporary art and world music presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music. Responding to…Find out more

EXHIBITION: On The Surface

May 7, 2016 - June 20, 2016

On The Surface is a Featured Exhibition of the 2016 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, featuring Susana Reisman‘s findings from her multi-year investigation into the nature of wood. Encompassing aspects of both drawing and painting even as it foregrounds relationships between sculpture and photography, the exhibition includes a selection of large-scale colour photographs and several freestanding wood sculptures.

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EXHIBITION: Moving right along

October 15, 2015 - October 25, 2015

Moving right along is the first solo exhibition of work by Nicolas Fleming in Toronto. Appropriating the visual language and syntax of design-build practices, Fleming’s new artworks and site-specific installation transform the exhibition space, exploiting the inherent imperfections and irregular marks characteristic of construction sites to challenge the white cube environment in which they are situated.

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EXHIBITION: THE NEW GODS

May 7, 2015 - May 31, 2015

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.

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EXHIBITION: Flights & Landings

May 12, 2015 - June 12, 2015

Flights and Landings is a two-part exhibition of work by three multidisciplinary artists from three different cities: Brooklyn-based Tamara Gayer, Berlin-based Christine Gedeon, and Toronto-based Janine Miedzik. Known for their visually engaging, site-responsive approaches to installation, each artist will debut a large-scale project in one of the stairwell galleries at Artscape Youngplace (the Flights), complemented by a selection of smaller artworks representing object-oriented aspects of their practices in the project space (the Landings).

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EXHIBITION: Elemental

November 7, 2014 - December 14, 2014
Featuring works by Cathryn Miller Curated by Shani K Parsons Elemental  is a solo exhibition featuring unique and editioned book works by Saskatchewan artist Cathryn Miller. Ranging from tiny folded paper projects to a new wall-sized composition, the thoughtfully conceived and often laboriously crafted works in the show represent a…Find out more

EXHIBITION: Of Other Faces

September 18, 2014 - October 25, 2014

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.

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EXHIBITION: The Order of Things

April 24, 2014 - May 31, 2014

The Order of Things features new and recent work by Leif Low-Beer (Toronto/Brooklyn), an artist who engages in a playful reordering of ideas, images, and expectations through the use of constructed, multi-part, and/or recombined compositions of drawings, collages, assemblages, and sculptural tableaux. The Order of Things is Low-Beer’s first solo exhibition in Canada.

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EXHIBITION: Erratic Room

November 19, 2013 - December 19, 2013

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.

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