Critical Distance FEATURING

Critical Distance is pleased to launch our Fall 2026 Study Hall program with an OPEN CALL for participants in To Whom It May Concern, a small-group workshop series curated by Anu Makinde. 

Over four in-person sessions starting in November, selected participants will engage in archival and multidisciplinary research and discussion on letter writing in relation to Black diasporic relationships across history and distance. Through reading, writing, watching, listening and making, participants will explore how such relationships have been formed, sustained, and strained through specific historical moments, and what such moments might mean for us in the present. 

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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 Jenna FitzGerald and a commissioned essay by Annapoorane Rajagopal Valarmathy, available to download and read here. foraging is on view at 180 Shaw Street, outside Artscape Youngplace, through Summer 2026. About the OCAD U Career Launcher Recipients Jenna FitzGerald is a multidisciplinary artist from Toronto whose work explores the intersection of technology and nature, inspired by both organic and digital imagery and materials. Her artworks reflect impermanence in the digital age and create new mythologies to reveal the magic in the world all around us,…Find out more

Social studies at Critical Distance: a convivial reading/writing group for the curatorially inclined.
Session one: A contingent curriculum

Join us for conversation and co-learning in an informal, intimate, and unintimidating atmosphere this coming Thursday, July 16th from 6:30-8:30pm. For this first session, titled ‘A contingent curriculum,’ we will explore concepts, politics, and practices of improvisation, contingency, catastrophe, and collaboration between curator, artist, and diverse publics in relation to our current exhibition, contemporary painting, and curating more broadly.

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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!

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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. 

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