Oakville L6J 1L6
Canada
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Oakville Galleries is pleased to announce its 2017 exhibition program, which includes solo presentations, new site-specific commissions and a group exhibition spread across the Galleries’ two venues.
Winter 2017
Etel Adnan: Sea and Fog
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
January 22–March 12, 2017
Born in Beirut in 1925, Etel Adnan is an acclaimed painter, essayist and poet. For her first solo exhibition in Canada, Adnan will present a series of recent works at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, including a selection of paintings, alongside prints, leporelli, tapestries, and film. Read together, these works demonstrate the rich breadth of this extraordinary artist’s practice, which reflects as readily on the political realities of our time as on the sustaining beauty and power of the natural world.
Les Levine: Transmedia
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
January 22–March 12, 2017
Charting the significant influence of pioneering Irish-Canadian-American artist Les Levine, Transmedia brings together a selection of Levine’s key works from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, a time when he was closely connected to the Toronto art scene. Working across, beyond and through media, Levine would become known for establishing practices in fields such as “camera art,” “media sculpture,” “software art,” and what he would term “Mott art.” Guest-curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan, this exhibition will exemplify what a key creative actor Levine was, measuring his innovations against what are now highly relevant contemporary art preoccupations.
Les Levine: Transmedia is funded in part by the Government of Canada.
Spring 2017
Cosima von Bonin: Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea?
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
March 26–May 28, 2017
Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea? explores Cosima von Bonin’s ongoing fascination with the ocean, a theme that is commonly evoked in her works but rarely made explicit. The opposing forces of the sea—both a mysterious underworld and a site of sun-seeking vacationers—operate as a metaphor throughout much of the influential artist’s practice, manifested here through a selection of works from 2008 onwards. Ranging from sculptures of creatures like crabs and sharks to a larger-than-life bikini, von Bonin’s cast of characters present a host of contradictions, weaving together humor with melancholy, softness with hardness, and access with exclusion.
Cosima von Bonin: Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Sea? is co-curated by SculptureCenter Curator Ruba Katrib and Glasgow International Director Sarah McCrory. The exhibition is organized by Glasgow International and SculptureCenter, New York. At Oakville Galleries, the exhibition is part of Germany @ Canada 2017, Partners from Immigration to Innovation. Cosima von Bonin is a guest of the Goethe-Institut.
Sojourner Truth Parsons: Holding Your Dog At Night
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
March 26–May 28, 2017
With their canny palette and crude perspective, the paintings of Sojourner Truth Parsons readily dispense with distinctions between interior and exterior worlds. Rendering the atmospheric and emotive energies she encounters as lucidly as physical truths, the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist observes a broad affective terrain in her work, detailing the dizzy indulgences of glamour and money as gamely as the dark heat of shame. For her show at Oakville Galleries, her first in a museum, Parsons will present a survey of her recent work in painting.
Summer 2017
Propped
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens & at Centennial Square
June 25–September 2, 2017
To propose, to proposition, to prop up: Propped explores the varied functions and meanings of the prop in contemporary artistic practice, examining how objects help us to make and shape history. The word “prop” suggests an inanimate but moveable object that must be activated by a human subject, one that is neither autonomous, nor a backdrop for human activity, but something in between: a “thing” that gains meaning through the context of its use. Through strategies of staged photography, re-enactment, stand-up comedy and assemblage, the artists in Propped—including Abbas Akhavan, Geoffrey Farmer, Duane Linklater, Hazel Meyer, Bridget Moser, and Theaster Gates, amongst many others—position props as highly charged objects that mediate people, history, politics, and the landscape. Propped is guest-curated by Gabrielle Moser.
Fall 2017
FASTWÜRMS: #Q33R_WTCH_P155
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
September 24–December 30, 2017
Melding conceptual art with queer culture, performance art, Witch Nation mysticism, and an eclectic DIY sensibility, FASTWÜRMS (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse) have enacted since 1979 an influential poly-disciplinary art practice premised on the mutual exchange and circulation of aesthetic knowledge. For Oakville Galleries, FASTWÜRMS will develop a new site-specific project, #Q33R_WTCH_P155, that continues their canny collision of iconographies, aesthetic systems, symbols, and affect codes. The exhibition will feature an appearance of their project Fortune-Teller Machine—Zardoz (FTM) (2014), a custom-designed caravan for interactive divination run by a coven of artist witches.
Tamara Henderson: Seasons End: Marshland Frolics
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
September 24–December 30, 2017
The third and final iteration of Tamara Henderson’s ongoing Seasons End project, Marshland Frolics continues the artist’s research into topics such as moon phases, the harvest, pagan rituals, and seasonal change. Collecting and creating objects and images from a variety of sources—including found and recycled materials and gifts gathered on the road—and imbuing them with dreams, memories and personal histories, Henderson will present a mise-en-scène of elaborate sewn sculptures, along with a collection of new props, objects and textile hangings, and her latest film work.
Tamara Henderson: Seasons End: Marshland Frolics is produced with the support of Glasgow International and REDCAT, Los Angeles.
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.
