Critical Distance Program Type Core Program

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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Featuring works by Stephanie E Creaghan, Andy Slater, Gillian Dykeman, Chandra Melting Tallow, Ashna Jacob, Aislinn Thomas, Anne Macmillan, Tamyka Bullen, and Dayna Danger
Curated by Megan Gnanasihamany and Morgan Melenka

On view: October 6 – November 26, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 6th, 7 to 9 pm

The making of art history is a process of translation. It flattens and unfolds through digital interfaces and methodologies of internet conservation, allowing exhibitions to spread through a temporal daisy chain of image, text, catalog, and critique. This chain of distillation — from material art object or experience to description and flat image—disseminates cultural themes, concepts, and conclusions across artistic landscapes, allowing for particular figures, galleries, and publications to become authoritative texts on contemporary work. Taking the 2018 Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition Anthropocene as its starting point, The Equivalence of Alloyed Gold is a year-long experimental commissioning and exhibition process hosted by Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) incorporating ideas of communication and sensory translation.

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Place Settings: Part II
Featuring works by Adrià Julià, Larissa Sansour, and Reza Nik

Curated by Noa Bronstein

Place Settings continues this summer with performance-based projects staged throughout the city of Toronto. Each project engages in a discursive gesture that considers new possibilities at the intersections of food practices and public space, revealing the shareable and relational qualities of both. 

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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