2020 exhibition program

Oakville Galleries is pleased to announce its exhibition program for 2020, which includes solo presentations, site-specific commissions and a group exhibition presented at both of the Galleries’ venues.

Tau Lewis: Sparkle’s Map Home
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
January 26 to March 22, 2020

The practice of Toronto-based artist Tau Lewis is anchored in geographies of the black imaginary. Working primarily with found textiles and foraged objects, Lewis’ works take shape through slow, labour-intensive processes such as carving, quilting and scavenging, drawing on a material and spiritual resourcefulness that has long been significant to black cultural production. For her exhibition at Oakville Galleries, Lewis re-envisions Gairloch Gardens as a scene from the cosmos, assembling a suite of new works in sculpture and textile to reflect on the possibilities of outer space as a locus of both a black past and a black future.

Shannon Te Ao: Ka mua, ka muri
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
January 26 to March 22, 2020

Ka mua, ka muri is a new sound and moving image installation by Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist Shannon Te Ao (Ngāti Tūwharetoa). Exploring our experience of time, history and song, it consists of a two-channel film and a text installation drawing on original songs developed by Te Ao in collaboration with Kurt Komene (Te Ātiawa, Taranaki Whānui). At the heart of the exhibition is an acknowledgement of the critical importance of language as a vital means to maintain links to indigenous knowledge systems, culture, and identity. 

Ka mua, ka muri has been co-commissioned by Oakville Galleries and Remai Modern, with the support of Creative New Zealand.

Elizabeth McIntosh: Show Up
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens and at Centennial Square
April 5 to June 7, 2020

Vancouver-based artist Elizabeth McIntosh has long been one of the most exciting and influential voices in contemporary Canadian painting. Over the last two decades, she has developed a complex body of work that provokes looking by resisting easy answers and always pushing for the unfamiliar and new. Show Up will survey the themes and motifs present in her most recent work, including a turn towards figuration and the use of various collage processes. Stretched across both Oakville Galleries locations, it will include a new series of small paintings alongside large-scale canvases that resonate playfully with the galleries’ distinctive architecture.

Two Truths and a Lie
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens and at Centennial Square
June 21 to September 13, 2020

Two Truths and a Lie is a group exhibition drawn largely from Oakville Galleries’ permanent collection. Engaging with our affinity for the slippages and perversities of fiction and deceit, the exhibition features artists such as Colin Campbell, Spring Hurlbut, Liz Magor, Louise Noguchi, Derek Sullivan, and Jin-me Yoon, amongst others. Building on the conceit of “Two Truths and a Lie”—a game that involves telling two possible, veritable truths and one guileful lie about oneself—the works in the exhibition move us away from the ostensibly objective and toward alternative ways of seeing.

Senga Nengudi: Hourglass
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens 
October 18, 2020 to January 3, 2021

Since the 1960s, Senga Nengudi has developed a ground-breaking practice that brings together sculpture, performance and dance. For her first exhibition in Canada, Oakville Galleries will present a selection of recent and older works that foreground the Colorado-based artist’s innovative use of found materials, such as sand, pantyhose, water, and plastic. The work of Lily B. Moor will also feature in the form of a collection of writings, brought together here for the first time. Through her eclectic reflections on the body, spirituality, materials, and movement, Nengudi has made an undeniably important contribution to the history of contemporary art and continues to have a resonant and vital voice that speaks to the key issues of our times.

Diedrick Brackens
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
October 18, 2020 to January 3, 2021

The woven work of Los Angeles-based artist Diedrick Brackens emerges from a broad spectrum of references—American literature and folklore, textile traditions spanning Europe, West Africa and the U.S. South, and the artist’s own biography—to render nuanced allegories of race, gender and sexuality in the United States. Telling stories rooted as readily in beauty and joy as in danger and brutality, Brackens’ process-driven works engage the affects of black, queer life against the backdrop of American history. For this, his first exhibition in Canada, Brackens bring together a selection of his recent works, both figurative and abstract.

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.