Shani K Parsons
Shani Khoo Parsons (she/her) is an independent curator, designer, mother, and founding director of Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC). With degrees in architecture (Temple U, Phila) and graphic design (RISD, Providence), she has pursued a transdisciplinary, process-driven practice within both independent and institutional contexts (AMNH, MoMA, Museum of Chinese in America, all NY), producing an eclectic body of work ranging from intimate artist’s books to immersive exhibitions. With Critical Distance she has collaboratively produced over 70 exhibitions and projects with 350+ artists and guest curators over the past decade, and has simultaneously developed an experimental independent curatorial practice; in 2022 she received her masters in visual/curatorial studies from the University of Toronto.
Key projects include Infinite Distance (accessible/interactive digital exhibition, transmediale, Berlin),Slipstreams at the Cinesphere (experimental video shorts program for In Future at Ontario Place, Toronto), Love’s Labours (moving image program at Revue Theatre, Toronto, as part of the Let Down Reflex by Amber Berson and Juliana Driever for the Blackwood Gallery), The Parkette Projects (site-responsive public art exhibition, Gallery TPW, Toronto), and The aleatory object (experimental collections-based gallery exhibition, Art Museum of the University of Toronto).
Image: Claritas, velvet and wood from FLIGHTS & LANDINGS (installation view), site-specific installation in the north stairwell at Artscape Youngplace, 2015.
EXHIBITION: The Contingent Image: John Climenhage with Critical Distance
September 20, 2025 - November 15, 2025Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) is pleased to present The Contingent Image, an artistic and curatorial collaboration and exhibition-as-research developed by Peterborough-based artist John Climenhage in conversation with CDCC Director Shani Khoo Parsons. Featuring an expansive new body of work that Climenhage has been developing since 2015, The Contingent Image is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Toronto in over 20 years.
Find out moreEXHIBITION > The New Gods
May 7, 2015 - May 31, 2015A 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.
Find out moreEXHIBITION: Of Other Faces
September 18, 2014 - October 25, 2014Of 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.
Find out moreEXHIBITION: Erratic Room
November 19, 2013 - December 19, 2013Featuring 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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