Critical Distance Program Type Billboard on Shaw

Billboard on Shaw presented by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in partnership with Critical Distance, featuring Monarch Butterflies at El Rosario II by Brendan George Ko, 2020.

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This billboard is presented as part of the group exhibition Groundwork, curated by Valérie Frappier for Critical Distance. Featuring artists Alana Bartol, Ileana Hernandez Camacho, and Tsēmā Igharas, the exhibition grapples with the mindset of extractivism and highlights how site-specific performance can bring focus to alternative ways of relating with land. Groundwork is a Featured Exhibition of the 2021 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. Groundwork foregrounds camouflage as a performance strategy to investigate the divide between human and non-human. Displayed here is documentation of a 2019 performance by Tsēmā titled real camo. The action took place on the obsidian quarry where her Tahltan ancestors harvested the volcanic rock in her territory’s mountains, located in the north-west of so-called British Columbia. In pointing to her…Find out more

Billboard on Shaw presented by Gallery TPW in partnership with Critical Distance, featuring Untitled (Angaer) by Jorian Charlton, 2020.

The individuals in Jorian Charlton’s photographs become stand-ins for everyday Black folks, whose beauty and culture often lack recognition and representation as they are. Taking cues from fashion photography, Charlton’s way of working emphasizes her sitter’s active role in being photographed.

Here, Charlton carefully captures the movement in her muse’s hair, distilling a sense of freedom and agency. She is unbound by the static nature of the frame.

Curated by Emilie Croning, Wedge Curatorial Projects.

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Billboard on Shaw presented by Gallery TPW in partnership with Critical Distance, featuring Piliutiyara by Kablusiak.

This billboard is presented in the context of Gallery TPW’s ongoing project MOVEMENTS, an online and site-specific program that reflects on both the intimate scale of the body as it shifts through time and space, and organized actions that provoke vital, unsettling change.

“In the photo series Piliutiyara (2019), Kablusiak deconstructs the sexualization of Indigenous women and femmes by making viewers hyper-aware of the settler colonial gaze. The artist faces the viewer with unselfconscious power and authority. In these works the viewer will look at the artist and see them in a way that they control. These works force the viewer not only to confront Kablusiak but to face the tropes and conventions in which Inuit women and femmes have been depicted by settlers throughout the European colonization of North America.”

—Lindsey Sharman, Sobey Art Award 2019 catalogue

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The Border Guards Were Friendly is part of a larger body of work that brings together Zinnia Naqvi’s family photos with assemblages of books, games, and VHS tapes. Documenting a 1988 holiday across various tourist sites in Ontario, the images were taken as a reconnaissance mission of sorts, marking the family’s decision to immigrate to Canada from Karachi, Pakistan. The mixture of personal snapshots—featuring places like the CN Tower and the Cullen Gardens & Miniature Village—with Naqvi’s deliberate object choices makes visible the tensions between Canada’s mythmaking of multiculturalism and the nation’s persistent legacies of colonialism and injustice. In this particular image, Naqvi extends the project to consider the realities and failings of Canadian citizenship. Referencing surveillance culture and systems…Find out more