Elif Saydam: Eviction Notice / Leisure: Having Ideas by Handling Materials

Oakville Galleries presents Eviction Notice, the first institutional exhibition in North America by Berlin-based Canadian artist Elif Saydam. The exhibition features a new body of work commissioned by Oakville Galleries. The exhibition Having Ideas by Handling Materials at Centennial Square by Leisure also continues.


Elif Saydam: Eviction Notice
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens

Curated by Theresa Wang.

In their expanded painting practice, Saydam examines the formation and judgment of aesthetic taste and the forces that influence them. With humour and rigour, the artist employs strategies of abundance and excess—combining diverse techniques, materials, content, and style—to create works that defy medium-specificity, bringing forth the connections between aesthetic and social ambivalences. 

Eviction Notice comprises a new body of work encompassing painting, textile, installation, and photography. Drawing upon traditions of ornamentation outside of the European canon, Saydam considers the dynamics of desire that are extended to objects and social spaces. They mine the decorative as a methodical and transgressive tool, one inextricably bound up in racialized ideologies of class and gender, and mobilize its falsely attributed frivolity to challenge what, or who, is of value. 

Set in the suburban backdrop of Gairloch Gardens where the gallery itself is a former domestic home, the exhibition extrapolates the material qualities of built structures. Mural-sized pieces expose the gallery’s skeletal foundations and ornamental origins, articulating broader topics around our collective aspirations of social mobility within both private and public spaces. In addition, diminutively-scaled artworks depicting urban landscapes under threat by commercial development are heavily embellished to form an expanding archive of cities bending and breathing under the inevitable forces of gentrification. Ultimately, the focus is on the lives and desires of those who dwell within these spaces. Saydam stages these relations and complicates them by using a contradictory logic of adornment. Together, the works in Eviction Notice disrupt, take up, and reshape spaces through the visual grammar of decoration to offer emancipatory potential.

Leisure: Having Ideas by Handling Materials
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square

Curated by Frances Loeffler.

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, often highlighting the work of overlooked women, including landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander and playwright Lina Loos. For their exhibition, they draw on educational theories articulated by artist Barbara Hepworth’s son Simon Nicholson, to create an exploratory, participatory space for children and all visitors. Particularly relevant is his essay The Theory of Loose Parts, which advocates for children to have freedom over their play environments. The exhibition thus asks us to rethink how we make, exhibit, and experience art—and ultimately how we lead our daily lives. 

About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is a contemporary art museum located 30 km west of Toronto. Housed in two spaces—one alongside downtown Oakville’s library, and the other in a lakeside mansion and park—Oakville Galleries is one of Canada’s leading art institutions, presenting the work of emerging and established artists from across Canada and around the world. 

Oakville Galleries is currently embarking upon a new direction that will place artists at the centre of its activities. Underway is an exciting New Museum capital project, a key aspect of Oakville’s new Downtown Cultural Hub. In the lead-up to this, Oakville Galleries is developing new programming and innovative opportunities for artists and audiences, and will be soon unveiling a state-of-the-art website. The Executive Director is Séamus Kealy.

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

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