Critical Distance Program Type Billboard on Shaw

Billboard on Shaw co-presented by Native Women in the Arts and Critical Distance  in partnership with Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and Partners in Art, featuring Shiibaashka’igan: Honouring the Sacred Jingle Dress by Nadya Kwandibens.

This outdoor component of the exhibition Materialized presents an image by newly-appointed Toronto Photo Laureate Nadya Kwandibens. Photographed at the Naotkamegwanning roundhouse, the portrait depicts three Anishinaabekwewag sharing a candid moment of laughter, subverting the “stoic Indian” trope that characterizes historical portraits by non-Indigenous photographers. It is said that laughter is medicine—this image brings together that energy with the healing power of the jingle dress.

 

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Billboard on Shaw presented by Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival in partnership with Capture Photography Festival and Critical Distance, featuring Grow Up #4 by Jake Kimble.

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Billboard on Shaw presented by Critical Distance, featuring Burtynsky Suite by Morgan Melenka and Megan Gnanasihamany, 2022.

Burtynsky Suite is composed of four reproductions of Carrara Marble Quarries, Cava di Calagrande #2 by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The reproductions range in degrees of abstraction, but each, unlike the seemingly cool distance of the original photograph, contain the rough edges of the process of translation and the clear marks of a subjective artistic rendering.

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Billboard on Shaw presented by Critical Distance, featuring A Very White Flower, by Adrià Julià, 2022.

A Very White Flower references Julià’s ongoing interest in the history of production, consumption and expansion of popcorn in modern colonial history. The image of a single kernel of popcorn functions as a prompt to consider Julià’s reflections on the historical and socioeconomic intricacies of the global corn industry and its relationship to Mexican culture and the popularization of popcorn in the United States after the Great Depression, especially in regards to popcorn’s connection to cinema.

A Very White Flower is presented in the context of Place Settings (curated by Noa Bronstein), a large-scale, durational project that considers how food functions to connect and disrupt.

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Billboard on Shaw presented by Critical Distance, featuring Suk by Tanya Lukin Linklater, 2021. Produced for this billboard space is an image of Tanya Lukin Linklater’s poem, Suk. Originally appearing in the artist’s book of writings entitled Slow Scrape, Suk is re-contextualized here in order to propose an alternative pace to the movement of bodies that pass by on the street, acting as an introduction to the exhibition that continues inside the gallery space. Though separated from its original context as part of a series of writings, traces remain to this life in the faint words visible on the reverse pages. This visual quality offers a reference to Lukin Linklater’s meditations on memory, language, and erasure which continue in both…Find out more