Critical Distance PROGRAMMING Billboard on Shaw by Catherine Blackburn

Critical Distance is pleased to present Scooped and Scattered, a public art billboard by English River First Nation artist Catherine Blackburn. Presented in-gallery as part of our 2023 exhibition Materialized (curated by Ariel Smith and co-presented with Native Women in the Arts), this re-installation of Blackburn’s work is to celebrate the recent release of CDCC’s Access Working Group (AWG) Report, and to honour Blackburn’s participation in creative access consultation and production in collaboration with Disabled arts workers, community members, and Critical Distance.

For AWG, organizational partners Critical Distance, Tangled Art + Disability, and Carleton University Art Gallery engaged with artists, curators, accessibility experts, and audio describers in Toronto and beyond, facilitating the translation of various exhibitions and artworks into mediating formats primarily intended for blind or low vision communities. For the Materialized exhibition in particular, the AWG brought together audio describer Kat Germain and Melanie Marsden, a blind Anishinaabekwe, to engage directly with artists in the exhibition, including Catherine Blackburn. Through an exploratory process attending to the ways in which works could be described and translated, new connections between the intricate processes of description and the meticulous methods of craft were made.

Blackburn’s photograph for the billboard is drawn from a 2015 series by the artist called Scooped and Scattered. In this series, the artist has carefully woven absences into family photos through a hand-sewing technique called blanket stitch, tracing the missing with delicate 24-carat plated beads. The magnification of Blackburn’s intimate works to billboard scale sets these absences in conversation with the scale of the body and passersby on Shaw Street.

Please read more about the original Materialized exhibition here. More information about the Access Working Group Report, and access to the full report, can be found here.

Critical Distance acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts for Sector Innovation support for Access Working Groups. Critical Distance is grateful for support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.