EVENT: Talk by Jonathan Middleton
April 18, 2025 - April 18, 2025Friday, April 18, 7 to 9 pm
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 122
Toronto, Ontario / M5V 3A8 / Canada
CRITICAL DISTANCE IS PLEASED TO PRESENT Slightly off-centre, maybe askew, a talk by artist, curator, and publisher Jonathan Middleton, as part of its current program, Study Hall.
In his talk at Critical Distance, Jonathan Middleton will reflect on his curatorial practice over the past 25+ years, highlighting his programming at several artist-run organizations, including Western Front, Or Gallery, Art Metropole, and Bodgers & Kludgers Cooperative Art Parlour. Early exhibition series such as Decentre, explored the role of the ‘confusing document’ to create space for interrogation and contemplation. Middleton traces a line through his curatorial work that touches on related concepts of offsetting, diffraction, parallax, and speculation that ultimately shape his understanding of artist-run institutions and their role in the visual and media art ecology.
This talk takes place in the context of Study Hall – a project that is as much a process as a program, through which the CDCC’s gallery has been functioning as a dedicated space and time to not only continue conversations about the centre’s future as a resource for curators. We invite our ever-widening network of curators to come forward and contribute their diverse perspectives on this question, while introducing other critical conversations that are shaping curating today. Through individual, interpersonal, and collective/group study, Study Hall seeks to foster more intentional, relational, and reciprocal opportunities for curatorial experimentation, co-learning, and co-presentation across divides of all kinds.
Please read more about Study Hall here.
Image: Mark Nakamura Back In Five (coloured pencil on paper), 2009. Installation on door of Or Gallery as part of Science Fiction 01 (27 June − 1 August 2009)
Critical Distance acknowledges operating support from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.