Sebastián Benítez, Petar Boskovic, Shelby Fenlon, Maxwell Hyett, and Mickey Mackenna (gallery); Maggie Groat & Jimmy Limit, Karen Henderson, and Josée Pedneault (stairwells)
Curated by Katelyn Gallucci
SIGNALS & SENTIMENTS, a Featured Exhibition of the 2017 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, is a two-part exhibition that examines how gesture functions as a mechanism for the production of identity. Continue reading
Critical Distance is pleased to announce the selection of Mountainburger by Aislinn Thomas for the Spring 2017 Billboard on Shaw. Through this program and partnership with Artscape Youngplace, we are continuing to provide an exciting opportunity for curators and artists to present large format printed artworks for the freestanding mural/billboard on our building’s front lawn.
In this playfully absurdist image, interdisciplinary artist Aislinn Thomas manufactures an encounter between a plush hamburger and a sylvan, mountainous landscape. As a symbol of Western commodity culture, the hamburger offering seems anomalous in this rugged environment, far from its usual metropolitan context. However this collision of topographic grandeur and the simulation of an urban icon can also be seen as a gesture of negotiation in the face of the sublime. Contextualized further through its placement in downtown Toronto, and coinciding with Canada’s 150th year celebrations, the billboard begins to raise pointed questions as to just where we as a country have come from and where we might hope to go from here.
Mountainburger will be on view outside Youngplace through August 2017. We wish to congratulate Aislinn, and to extend sincere thanks to the many curators and artists whose thoughtful proposals for our spring billboard were a pleasure to consider. Stay tuned for new opportunities to submit proposals again in the future.
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Please join us to celebrate the new billboard on Thursday, April 27th from 6–9 pm
A reception for artist will take place in our third floor gallery at Youngplace and will coincide with the opening of Signals & Sentiments, our Featured Exhibition for the 2017 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
Critical Distance Centre for Curators (CDCC)
Suite 302, Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto, ON M6J 2W5
See Google map of location
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About the Artist
Aislinn Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, installation and text-based work. She culls material from everyday experiences and relationships, exploring themes of vulnerability, empathy, possibility and failure. Aislinn is a recent graduate of the University of Waterloo MFA program and earned a BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of several grants and awards including a C.D. Howe Scholarship for Arts and Design, a Social Science and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Masters Scholarship, and grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Aislinn currently lives and works in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
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Critical Distance thanks Artscape Youngplace for their generous support of this project.
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image: Aislinn Thomas, Mountainburger (billboard), 2017, on view at 180 Shaw Street in Toronto’s West Queen West neighbourhood through August 2017.
March 10–April 9, 2017
Critical Distance is pleased to present Precious Commodity, a group exhibition of recent works by Eunice Luk, Ella Dawn McGeough, Juan Ortiz-Apuy, and Biliana Velkova, curated by Alison Cooley.
Articulating a tension between objects and their ways of being—their forms, their significance, their social and economic circulation—Precious Commodity brings together artworks that examine the complicated sweetness of things. Unanchoring objects from their exchange within capitalism, the artists in the exhibition resignify them as vessels for fantasy, desire, and alternate possibility. Reflecting on the nature of a world populated by things with definitive practical uses and monetary values, each artist playfully contends with form, usurping existing representations in the service of building new meanings. Continue reading
February 24–28, 2017
Featuring Yael Brotman, Melanie Chikofsky, Doug Guildford, Tessar Lo, Tim Manalo, Roula Partheniou, Meghan Price, and Natalie Wood, curated by Sonya Filman
Critical Distance is pleased to host the second annual In House Benefit Art Show. Continue reading
January 19–February 19, 2017
CDCC is pleased to present The Path, The Divide, a solo exhibition of recent works by Canadian artist Brynn Higgins-Stirrup, curated by Oana Tanase.
Fascinated by the ways in which we confront and reconcile intuitive inquiry with organized thought and form, Higgins-Stirrup has developed a distinctive visual language and practice that revolves around learning systems, geometry, mapping, and writing. Seducing the viewer through technical exactitude and material subtlety, her artworks speak of the space that lies between knowledge and truth, information and meaning.
on view January–April 2017
Critical Distance is pleased to present the second artist’s project in our newest initiative, the Billboard on Shaw, through which we are providing opportunities, in partnership with Artscape Youngplace, for curators and artists to propose large format printed artworks for the freestanding mural/billboard outside our building on Shaw Street.
Lost in Shape is an 8-foot image by Toronto and Tel Aviv-based artist Ruth Adler to be unveiled the week of January 18 (note above image is placeholder). As she poignantly states,
Thursday, December 1, 2016 starting at 3pm
Critical Distance is pleased to support Day With(out) Art in partnership with Visual AIDS. As the Toronto host for a screening of COMPULSIVE PRACTICE, a 65-minute video compilation of compulsive, daily, and habitual practices by nine artists and activists who live with their cameras as a way to manage, reflect upon, and change how they are deeply affected by HIV/AIDS, CDCC joins 60 other international organizations and institutions in commemorating World AIDS Day.
November 5–December 11, 2016
Jeannette Ehlers and Patricia Kaersenhout, Søren Thilo Funder, Jens Haaning, Maj Hasager, Tina Helen,
Stine Marie Jacobsen, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
Critical Distance is pleased to present Crossing the Line, a timely and provocative survey of contemporary Danish art curated by Earl Miller. Recognizing the transnational nature of much recent art from Denmark, the exhibition asks: Can a nation define itself culturally by looking beyond its traditional borders?
October 28–31, 2016
featuring Dominica Publishing and works by Martine Syms, Lauren Anderson, Hannah Black, Marco Braunschweiler, Erin Christovale & Amir George, David Hartt, Sara Knox Hunter, and Diamond Stingily; plus Eve Fowler; Claire Goodwin; and Leslie Hewitt, Matt Keegan, Michael Queenland & Lori Salmon; Kevin Haas; Sophie Calle; Tings Chak; Manar Moursi & David Puig; Jeannette Ehlers; and selected publications and editions produced by Typology Projects and Critical Distance Centre for Curators
Tues, October 18, 2016 from 6–8 pm
In partnership with SAVAC and the Women and Gender Studies Institute, CDCC is pleased to co-present a talk given by Manar Moursi, as part of the release of her recently launched book, Sidewalk Salon: 1001 Street Chairs of Cairo, co-authored with David Puig.
on view September 21–October 23, 2016
Critical Distance Centre for Curators is pleased to present The Amoebic Workshop: A Submerged Exhibition, curated by Astarte Rowe and featuring countless living Mediolus corona amoebas in an aquarium habitat, plus artworks by Jessica Drenk (US), Gabriel Lalonde (Canada), and Claudia Wieser (Germany).
on view September 2016–January 2017
Critical Distance is pleased to present our newest initiative, The Billboard Project, through which we are providing opportunities, in partnership with Artscape Youngplace, for curators and artists to propose large format printed artworks for the freestanding mural/billboard outside our building on Shaw Street.
Come to My Window is an 8-foot image by Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Steven Beckly. As project curator Matthew Kyba writes, Continue reading
3 screenings: 9/17, 9/19, and 9/20
Critical Distance is thrilled to present Slipstreams, an original 30-min program of moving image works by Morehshin Allahyari (Brooklyn), Maria Flawia Litwin (Toronto), Manuel Saiz (Logroño, Spain), Marianna Milhorat (Chicago), and Terence Nance (Brooklyn). Our program will screen in the Cinesphere at Ontario Place on three dates during in/future, an exciting festival of art and music presented by Art Spin in partnership with Small World Music, September 15-25, 2016. Responding to the site and festival context, Slipstreams brings together five artists whose works envisage the slippage of time between past and future, and how humans seek to transcend the present moment.
Weds, Sept 7, 2016 from 6:30–9 pm
Critical Distance was pleased to host the launch event for AIDS and Memory, Issue 13.2 of Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture, edited by CDCC advisory board member, Ricky Varghese. Complementing the magazine’s September 1 online launch, this event included a premiere of Vincent Chevalier’s film À Vancouver and a panel discussion with Chevalier, Varghese, and issue contributors Michele Pearson Clarke, Liz Gibson-DeGroote, Francisco-Fernando Granados, Theodore Kerr, and Cait McKinney. Continue reading