OAKVILLE, ON.- Oakville Galleries announces the opening of their winter exhibitions—What Is a Self?, a new suite of works by London, Ontario-based artist Sky Glabush; and The Green of Her, an exhibition of works drawn from Oakville Galleries’ permanent collection.
Sky Glabush: What Is a Self?
17 January – 13 March 2016
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
Over the past two decades, London, Ontario-based artist Sky Glabush has drawn on a wide variety of practices—including painting, drawing and sculpture—to work through pressing questions of identity, history, faith, and the role of the artist. Charting a broad path through varying forms and styles, Glabush's practice is anchored in concurrent concerns with modernism and autobiography.
For What Is a Self?, Glabush takes over the former estate house of Gairloch Gardens with an array of large-scale weavings and mixed-media sculptures. Weaving appeals to Glabush as creative labour that is both meditative and time-consuming; often working with fibres still wet with dye, his subdued colours bleed into one another. Woven swatches also adorn the surfaces of his modular sculptures, which are assembled from materials ranging from found wooden chairs to building materials such as plaster, concrete, plywood, and tile. With each gallery installation conceived as a distinct vignette, What Is a Self? stages an intriguing conversation about interiority, both as we understand it at the scale of the domestic and in terms of the construction of our innermost selves.
Guest curated by Jon Davies
The Green of Her
17 January – 6 March 2016
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
Over 80 years ago, a widely circulated image secured the Loch Ness Monster within the lexicon of modern-day myth. While the so-called “Surgeon's Photograph" is now commonly understood as a hoax—documenting a semi-submerged toy submarine, not an elusive lake-dweller—it speaks to the seemingly bottomless human fascination with visualizing what is hidden from view.
The works included in The Green of Her map out landscapes in unlikely sources—a fur muff, a floral carpet, the folds of a napkin—and imagine what new forms of life could be concealed within them. Throughout the exhibition, both the mundane realities of the home and the murky depths of the subterranean appear as strange and hybrid spaces, offering the potential for solitude and protection from external threat.
Like Loch Ness as described in Patricia Lockwood's “Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It"—the poem from which the exhibition takes its name—these environments sustain their creatures, isolate them, and depend on them in turn, proposing new ways of understanding how we relate to the worlds we inhabit.
The Green of Her is drawn from the permanent collection of Oakville Galleries.
Featuring work by Valérie Blass, Therese Bolliger, Wendy Coburn, Angela Grauerholz, Isabelle Hayeur, Deirdre Logue, Liz Magor, Luanne Martineau, Naoko Matsubara, Tricia Middleton, and Paulette Phillips.
