Critical Distance PROGRAMMING EXHIBITION: THE NEW GODS

Artist(s) Josée Pedneault and Alejandro Garcia Contreras 
Curator(s)  Shani K Parsons

A cross-continental collaboration between Canadian artist Josée Pedneault (Montreal) and Mexican artist Alejandro Garcia Contreras (Mexico City), The New Gods is a Featured Exhibition of the 2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival and the first exhibition to feature the collaborative work of Alejandro Garcia Contreras and Josée Pedneault in Canada.

Featuring an extraordinary series of large-scale photographs, this project examines fantastical rites of spring that have emerged spontaneously within Carrillo Puerto, an isolated village in the mountains of Chiapas in southern Mexico. The exhibition will also include a select grouping of smaller sculptures and paintings as an extension of the photographic subject matter into other media, an experimental approach which is integral to this multidisciplinary collaboration.

Each spring for the past several years, Carrillo Puerto has undertaken a most unusual interpretation of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross), the religious tradition of reenacting the events leading up to Christ’s death on Good Friday. Elsewhere in Mexico, it is a day of organized procession, penitence, and mourning, but in this small village it has evolved into an irreverent, chaotic, and carnivalesque celebration of the absurd. Drawing on an unholy mix of religious beliefs, local and popular culture, pagan traditions, and personal mythologies, participants don homemade costumes that are highly theatrical and transformative, often verging on pure abstraction. Through the adoption of new voices, gaits, and gestures as well, the chimerical personalities they assume become an alternate pantheon of strange deities and demons, existing in opposition to the highly codified characters and narratives of the traditional Passion play.

Programs, Events, and Public Art

Exhibition Opening
Thursday, May 7th, 2016
6:00 – 8:00 pm: Exhibition opening to be held with the two artists,  who will be traveling from Montreal and Mexico to be with us. Refreshments will be served and all are welcome!

Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC) was founded in 2013 under our former name, TYPOLOGY. Established as a not-for-profit space devoted to curatorial and artistic experimentation, we devoted our first three years to providing opportunities for curators and artists to mount fully realized exhibitions within a critical framework. In 2016, we relaunched under our new name (CDCC) with a new Board of Directors and a commitment to meet the need, voiced by local and national curators, for a truly vital curatorial community—one that both supports emerging and underrepresented curators, and advances curatorial practice and inquiry. The New Gods took place in CDCC’s exhibition space in 2015 under our former name, TYPOLOGY, and was curated by CDCC’s Founding Director, Shani K Parsons. TYPOLOGY Projects was originally located at 180 Shaw Street, No. 302, Artscape Youngplace, Toronto.

The New Gods is a Featured Exhibition of the 2015 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. This exhibition is made possible by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA) of the National Council for Culture and the Arts of Mexico.

Image: Josée Pedneault and Alejandro Garcia Contreras, from The New Gods series, 2013–2014.