Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild / Wolf Tones: A Many-Sided House

Oakville Galleries is thrilled to announce its exhibition program for winter 2023 with solo exhibitions by British artist Helen Cammock and US-based collaborative group Wolf Tones. An array of public programs will be presented at both gallery sites throughout the exhibitions, including a performance by cellist Charles Curtis, presented in conjunction with Wolf Tones: A Many-Sided House.

The opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 28 at Centennial Square and in Gairloch Gardens (2:30–5pm). All are welcome. For related public programming, please visit oakvillegalleries.com for updated information.

Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
January 28–May 13, 2023

British artist Helen Cammock has a multidisciplinary practice that stretches across film, music, print, performance, and text. For her first exhibition in Canada, Oakville Galleries will be showing They Call It Idlewild, a film and text installation that was developed by the artist during a residency at Wysing Arts Centre in the UK. The exhibition considers the notion of idleness, both its potential as a profoundly generative space of creativity and sustenance, and the political misuses, structural power play, and racial stereotyping that continue to surround it. Largely produced just before the pandemic, the works take on new meanings in today’s world, amid the unrelenting pressures of hyperproductivity, the struggle to maintain livelihoods, and the persistence of colonial and class-based power structures that allow some to live from the labour of others.

Wolf Tones: A Many-Sided House
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens 
January 28–May 13, 2023

A Many-Sided House is the first exhibition in Canada of work by Wolf Tones (currently Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Sterrett Smith, Pradeep Dalal, and David Levi Strauss), a collaborative group of US-based artists, convened in 2019 by Nancy Shaver, that has been creating densely constructed installations over the past four years. Working separately and together, these artists gather, borrow, and exchange their works throughout the four adjacent rooms of Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, a historic home on the shores of Lake Ontario. Responding to the unique context of this site, Wolf Tones considers the handmade, the anonymous, connection and exchange, difference and recurrence, material histories, the lake, flotsam, and the movement and circulation of images, objects, and materials.

In conjunction with A Many-Sided House, cellist Charles Curtis will give a performance in The Studio at Gairloch Gardens on the evening of March 15, 2023. Curtis will perform a series of compositions that engage the cello as a site of uncertainty, a physical and acoustical object to be explored in performance, without advance knowledge of what the exploration might yield. While clearly framed as performative tasks, the compositions are inherently incomplete, and permeable to the material and spatial conditions at hand.

About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum located 30 kilometers 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 is located on Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. As an institution, Oakville Galleries recognizes the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful and respectful relationships with the original inhabitants and keepers of the land, and we are grateful for the opportunity to operate on this territory.

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