2019 exhibition program

Oakville Galleries is pleased to announce its exhibition program for 2019, which includes solo presentations, site-specific commissions and a group exhibition presented at both of the Galleries’ venues.

Winter 2019

Valérie Blass: The Mime, the Model and the Dupe
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens & at Centennial Square
January 27 to March 17, 2019

The sculptural work of Valérie Blass operates in the realm of the double, trafficking in formal and perceptual inversions, distortions and discontinuities. Working with touchstones that extend from art history to the Internet, Blass’ practice bridges figurative and abstract forms—often anthropomorphic in character—to develop a sculptural vernacular rooted as readily in the idiosyncratic and illusory as the classical and representational. In The Mime, the Model and the Dupe, Oakville Galleries brings together a selection of the Montreal-based artist’s works from the past ten years, highlighting the broad range of approaches, techniques and gestures that constitute her practice.

Spring 2019

Pio Abad: Splendour
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
March 31 to June 2, 2019

In Pio Abad’s Splendour, the Manila-born, London-based artist brings together a series of objects and images that draw connections between moments of political and economic upheaval—from the fall of Cold War-era dictatorships that erroneously heralded “the end of history” to the economic crises of 2008 that brought us to our current age of political disenchantment. Lifting its title from an Abi Morgan play, which takes place in the drawing room of an unnamed autocracy on the eve of its collapse, the exhibition imagines Gairloch Gardens as the setting of another scene of political decay. Splendour reflects on the roles of repetition and mistranslation in our understanding of history and asks how we might meaningfully go forward at a moment of global political unease.

Rebecca Brewer & Rochelle Goldberg: Waves and Waves
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
March 31 to June 2, 2019

Longtime friends and occasional collaborators, New York-based artist Rochelle Goldberg and Vancouver-based artist Rebecca Brewer have been engaged in a dialogue about their respective practices for years. This exhibition emerges from that conversation, with their distinct ideas unfolding materially in a shared space for the first time. The project sees both artists explore forms that allude to the relationship between human life and the natural world: Brewer’s recent textile works recall dream-like perceptions—seen here alongside new paintings that stem from an early memory of being carried out to sea on a wave—whereas Goldberg’s sculptural works evoke material transitions, tactility and the traces that contact leaves on human bodies and other living beings. 

Summer 2019

Material Tells
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens & at Centennial Square
June 23 to September 8, 2019

Taking the politics of making as its point of departure, this group exhibition explores the cultural meanings that emerge from the materials artists use. Drawing on the writings of Édouard Glissant, guest curator Daisy Desrosiers assembles a selection of works that engage often-overlooked narratives within cultural histories, considering the itinerant and opaque legacies that surround certain materials. Ideas of belonging, witnessing, domesticity, and migratory journeys are brought to the fore, engaging shared and self-reflective experiences and inviting audiences to be guided by the stories that they tell. Exhibiting artists include Alvaro Barrington, Beverly Buchanan, Jesse Chun, Azza El Siddique and Kapwani Kiwanga, amongst others.

Fall 2019

Laurie Kang
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
September 22, 2019 to January 5, 2020

Bringing together research in fields such as biology, feminist theory and science fiction with reflections on her own history, the work of Laurie Kang takes as its point of departure the conditions and structures of the body, and the means through which it is delineated, apprehended and situated sociopolitically. Frequently working with unfixed, continually sensitive materials, Kang’s works create conditions of encounter rooted in the tactile, the embodied and the affective, staging scenes that are both literally and metaphorically primordial and in flux. For this, her first solo museum project, the Toronto-based artist will create a new site-specific installation that responds to the architecture of Gairloch Gardens.

Georgia Dickie: Agouti Sky
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
September 22, 2019 to January 5, 2020

The installations of Toronto-based artist Georgia Dickie are composed from an ever-growing collection of found objects that she accrues in her studio. Bringing them together according to an ulterior logic that eschews the values and meanings usually assigned to such things, the primary focus of Dickie’s work is on arranging—staging, grouping, balancing, placing—an activity that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work. Agouti Sky takes as its starting point a satellite dish, its parabolic shape informing the exhibition’s overall composition, and suggesting narratives to do with humankind’s ongoing attempts to understand, communicate, and connect.

About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum located 30 km west of Toronto. Housed in two spaces—one alongside a public library in downtown Oakville, and another in a lakeside mansion and park—Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading art museums, with a primary commitment to presenting the work of early and mid-career artists from across Canada and around the world.

Oakville Galleries operates with support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Corporation of the Town of Oakville.