Summer and fall 2023 exhibition programs

Oakville Galleries is thrilled to announce its exhibition programs for summer and fall 2023, with solo exhibitions by Timothy Yanick Hunter, Julia Brown, Leisure and Elif Saydam. An array of public programs will be presented at both gallery sites throughout the exhibitions. For more details, please visit oakvillegalleries.com.
 

Timothy Yanick Hunter: Collapse and Incompletion
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens 
June 3–September 2, 2023

Working across painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation, Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter views media as a range of languages that can be drawn upon and experimented with to re-envision storytelling. For Collapse and Incompletion, his first solo exhibition in a public museum, Hunter will present a new series of installations that investigate historical material and synthesize physical and digital archives. A nod to notions of collective and diasporic memory, this exhibition will see Hunter evolve his work into new forms of multidisciplinary experimentation, such as multi-channel video installation, sculpture, and fabric prints, that respond to the space and setting of Gairloch Gardens by Lake Ontario.

Timothy Yanick Hunter: Collapse and Incompletion is commissioned by Oakville Galleries with the support of Partners in Art.
 

Julia Brown: American Vernacular
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens (Salah Bachir Gallery)
June 3–September 2, 2023

In the Salah Bachir Gallery screening space, Oakville Galleries will be showing American Vernacular, a film installation by Baltimore-based artist Julia Brown. The single-channel film comprises six scenes; in each, a pair of actors perform the function of a “Black Americana” historical object. This act of personification makes visible the objects’ entanglements with race, class, and lived space. Set in period rooms of different eras, Brown’s film depicts the fantasies, desires, and violence embedded in the racial imaginary that persists to this day. 

Leisure: Having Ideas by Handling Materials
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
June 3–December 30, 2023

Leisure is a collaboration between Montreal-based artists Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley. Working together since 2004, they use a wide range of media, including video, sculptural installation, and text. Their practice considers ideas of connection, collaboration, creativity, and relation, and in the past has often highlighted the work of overlooked women, such as the landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and playwright Lina Loos. For their exhibition at Oakville Galleries, they will draw on educational theories articulated by artist Barbara Hepworth’s son Simon Nicholson, to create an exploratory, participatory space for children and visitors of all ages. Particularly relevant is his essay “The Theory of Loose Parts,” which advocates for children to have freedom over their play environments. Here this becomes a potentially transformative proposition with wider implications in society at large, asking us to rethink how we make, exhibit, and experience art—and ultimately how we lead our daily lives.

Elif Saydam: Eviction Notice
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens 
October 1–December 30, 2023

In their expanded painting practice, Berlin-based artist Elif Saydam examines the formation and judgment of aesthetic taste and the forces that influence them. Eviction Notice, Saydam’s first institutional exhibition in Canada, draws upon traditions of ornamentation outside of the European canon to consider dynamics of desire that are extended to objects and social spaces. Saydam will present new works encompassing painting, textile, installation, and photography that mine the decorative as a methodical tool for contextualizing sociopolitical narratives. Set in the domestic, suburban backdrop of Gairloch Gardens, a former home, the exhibition extrapolates the material qualities of built structures to articulate broader topics such as social mobility and collective aspirations within an increasingly gentrified world.
 

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