Critical Distance FEATURING

Critical Distance and the Embassy Cultural House are pleased to announce a celebratory book launch for Not/For the Money, an online exhibition featuring works by artists and cultural workers examining themes related to money, capital, and value. Featuring contributions from Ron Benner, Karl Beveridge, Lily Cho, Matthew Dawkins, Holly English, Soheila Esfahani, Kelly Greene, Jamelie Hassan, SF Ho, Michael Maranda, Alistair MacKinnon, Patrick Mahon, David Merritt, Mohamed Monaiseer, Sheri Osden Nault, Wanda Nanibush, Shelley Niro, Claudia Sambo, Ruth Strebe, and Jeff Thomas, the Not/For the Money exhibition catalogue will be available for perusal and purchase, alongside artists’ multiples, postcards, and prints by Anahí González, Incé Husain, and others, and a full complement of past publications by ECH. 

This year, Critical Distance is turning 13, and while some might call it an “awkward phase,” we’re choosing this moment to celebrate how lucky we’ve been over the past 13 years.

It’s been our good fortune to collaborate with over 350 guest curators, artists, and co-presenting partners on 70+ exhibitions and curatorial projects, 30+ public art billboards, and well over 100+ art and educational events including screenings, performances, workshops, field trips, talks, and tours since opening our doors in 2013!

As we look ahead to our next 13 years, we’re asking for your support to keep the momentum going. If Critical Distance has ever supported, engaged, challenged, enriched, or inspired you, now is a great moment to give back. As a small arts organization facing real sustainability barriers, every dollar makes a huge difference in helping us continue to both provide, and thrive.

Click HERE to DONATE NOW!

Free and open to the public, TURNING TABLES 2 is a hybrid art book market + exhibition that shines a spotlight on over 30 local, regional, national, and international arts publishers and producers of art books, critical arts publications, zines, periodicals, and more.

Critical 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. 

As an exhibition-as-research, The Contingent Image is an invitation to visitors to participate through the making of their own unique assemblages on a large table in the gallery space using a selection of Climenhage’s original works set aside for this purpose. In conversations that arise through this hands-on opportunity, visitors can gain insight not only into Climenhage’s artistic processes in relation to contemporary painting and abstraction—they can experience for themselves, firsthand, a sense of how “painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition.” ² With each ‘refresh,’ other images and ideas will rise to the surface as visual and conceptual associations between shapes, colours, lines, volumes, and voids are dissolved and reconstituted anew. 

OCAD University’s RBC Centre for Emerging Artists & Designers (CEAD), in partnership with Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC), is pleased to present this Public Art Billboard and Exhibition Essay Career Launcher featuring artwork by Jenelle Smith and a commissioned essay by Kathleen Foran-Spragge.