Public Art and Exhibitions

Oakville Galleries is a not-for-profit contemporary art museum with exhibit spaces in two locations:

• Centennial Square at 120 Navy Street, and
• Gairloch Gallery at 1305 Lakeshore Road East

The following works are located in the Gairloch Gardens sculpture park.

Wind Bower, 1990 by Catherine Widgery

Steel, laminated walnut and mahogany

Active as a sculptor for 30 years, American artist Catherine Widgery has developed numerous public artworks that integrate technology and the natural environment. Situated just steps away from the main entrance of Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens, Widgery’s Wind Bower is an interactive, immersive work that captures the shifting sights and sounds of the garden. Consisting of an open structure of metal rods with a seating area and a canopy of softly tinkling wind chimes, the work is at once a product of industry and intellect, and a pleasant, shady nook for passers-by to sit in and become attuned to the shifting sensations of nature.

Giant Beaver Charm, 1999-2000 by Fastwürms

Chrome-plated steel, surgical stainless steel and bronze

The immersive art/life performative works and installations of the Canadian collective Fastwürms bring together conceptual art, popular aesthetics, do-it-yourself amateurism, and humour with various ‘sub-cultural’ sensibilities - queer, working-class, wiccan, occult, and gothic. The duo also has a long-standing affinity with and reverence for the natural world and animals, particularly cats (their own cats often feature in their work).

Wrapped around a distinctive willow tree standing at the edge of the Gairloch Gardens pond, Giant Beaver Charm is – as the title suggests – an oversized charm bracelet with a giant suspended beaver tooth, among other ornaments. Commissioned as part of the exhibition ‘Beaver Tales’ in 2000, it reworks and subverts Canada’s entrenched national icon, suggesting alternative symbolisms and systems of belief.

Falling Up, 1983 by Ian Lazarus

Buffed stainless steel

Since the early 1970s, Ian Lazarus has created sculptures for exhibitions and public environments in Malaysia, Ireland, Mexico, and across Canada. Glimpsed momentarily by motorists who drive past Gairloch Gardens along Lakeshore Road, Falling Up creates the paradoxical illusion of four solid, stainless steel pillars seemingly knocked upwards, as though rewinding backwards in time. This subtly surreal backwards motion catches viewers off guard, creating a temporary rupture in our understanding of gravity and the “natural” order of things. Falling Up is one of the first works that was commissioned for the Gairloch Gardens Sculpture Park.

Channel, 2004 by Liz Magor

Bronze

Over the past five decades, Liz Magor has developed a world-renowned practice that contemplates everyday items such as clothing, packaging, labels, furniture, twigs, branches, and tree stumps. Throughout our lives we are surrounded with ‘stuff’ both natural and fabricated, often forming complex relationships with them. Magor’s work considers what these relationships say about our personal desires and insecurities, as well as the wider pressures of societal, economic, and other outside forces that inform our attachments to things. Often her objects become subtly altered through processes of casting, remodelling, or resituating, so that the boundary between the real and the simulated is no longer clear.

Placed in a wooded area of Gairloch Gardens, Channel is a tree stump cast in bronze that seems at first glance to be entirely harmonious with its natural surroundings. A closer look, however, reveals two eye-like openings. This anthropomorphic twist catches us off guard, and reveals our profoundly unstable relationship to the things we think we know.

A Large Slow River, 1999 by Janet Cardiff

Audio Walk (38 Minutes)

Janet Cardiff is a Canadian artist who has been celebrated internationally for her work with sound; particularly her audio walks, which she has often made in collaboration with her husband and fellow artist George Bures Miller. A Large Slow River is an audio walk commissioned specifically to respond to Gairloch Gardens, made while the artists were in residence at the gallery. It was recorded on-site using omni-directional microphones that captured a soundscape of the gardens one might experience on any given day. The recording was then crafted into a uniquely moving and unsettling narrative audio work, which takes listeners on a walk around the gardens, drawing attention to the themes of water, time, memory, and displacement.

Still Life & Blind, 1988 by John McEwen

Aluminium and Steel

John McEwen is well known within Canada for his large-scale sculptures of animals, namely dogs, deer and wolves, which are often flame-cut from slabs of steel. The artist is interested in how these specific animals often  spark a sense of mystery and magic in the human imagination, and can reveal the interconnections between what we often perceive separately as ‘nature’ or ‘culture’. In Still Life & Blind, the sparse outline of a deer is barely visible from a distance, seeming to stand at the lake’s edge. In its original installation, the piece also included a “blind” - a camouflaged place for humans to watch animals without being seen. Here, it acts as a prompt to consider the relationship between viewer and viewed.

1929-1984 Landscape, 1973 by Walter Redinger

Fibreglass

Based in Ontario for most of his life, Walter Redinger was well known for his elemental, pod-like fibreglass sculptures. Created in 1973 (a year after Redinger represented Canada in the Venice Biennale), 1929-1984 Landscape is the first work that was commissioned for the Gairloch Gardens Sculpture Park. The title of the work alludes to the 1929 stock market crash and George Orwell’s well-known dystopian work of fiction, 1984. In framing the decades between these years, Redinger marks out an era of instability in which visions of a dystopian future were coming to pass. Vaguely anthropomorphic, the four figures in this sculptural group suggest a community, albeit one in which individual identities have been eroded by the mechanical and societal developments of a fast-changing world.

Iroquois Ridge Older Adults Centre

Youth Gallery

Lucas Mindzak

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Oakville Trafalgar Community Centre

Galleria art display

Ravenous Appetite and Boundless Energy, Barb Choit, 2020 (75 linear feet of 18mm hand drawn coloured lead free glass tubing filled with 75% argon and 25% neon)

An anamorphic neon sculpture depicting a chimney swift. The piece draws inspiration from a resident colony of swifts in the old Oakville Trafalgar High School located next to the community centre.

Watch a video conversation with Oakville Galleries Curator Frances Loeffler and Vancouver-based artist Barb Choit about the new public artwork commissioned by the Town of Oakville for display in the galleria of Oakville Trafalgar Community Centre.

Fitness Track

100 + 20/4 = 30, John Willard, 1987 (quilts)

A series of four quilts that have come to be known as the “John Willard ribbon quilts” was commissioned by Oakville Galleries to mark their twentieth anniversary. It incorporates traditional quilting elements inspired by pioneer quilt makers. At OTCC it is installed as the artist envisioned, on one full wall.

Renowned Canadian designer/quilt maker and Oakville Library staff for 21 years, John Willard began quilting in 1975, with a background in set and costume design, photography, display, and collecting. Inspired by traditional patterns and historic events, he is especially noted for deconstructing patterns and designing quilts with daring combinations of varying and disparate fabric prints. Willard taught the art of quilt making, specializing in contemporary design.

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Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre

Something for Everyone, Emily May Rose, 2018 (vinyl wrap)

Artist Emily May Rose’s fun and bright design was the winning proposal for a mural wrap to cover the generator located at the Queen Elizabeth Community and Cultural Centre. Made with careful consideration of colour and composition to create works that are both beautiful and meaningful, the mural reflects the community centre by combining aspects of the local arts and culture, recreation, nature, and history of Oakville.

Emily May Rose is a Toronto-based artist and illustrator. She explores urban themes and her own personal experiences living in the city, generally placing animals like raccoons into the scenarios in a humorous way to make light of their situation.

For more information about the artist visit www.emilymayrose.com

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River Oaks Community Centre

Canada 150 Mural Mosaic

The Canada 150 Mural Mosaic Project brings together 150 communities and thousands of participants by creating community murals that visually reflect the history and culture of Canada. Oakville’s unique mural is composed of 750 tiles, which were painted by residents during registered workshops in February 2016.

Led by artist Lewis Lavoie and his Mural Mosaic Team based out of Alberta, you can visit www.canada150mosaic.com to follow the mural’s progress across Canada.

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Sixteen Mile Sports Complex

Louis Riel And The Church at Batoche, 1885

Since 2005, artist Liz Pead has been using recycled hockey gear to create large scale installation paintings which speak to the Canadian histories of textile, legend, sport and landscape painting through the Group of Seven. This work involved cutting up and affixing the bits of recycled hockey gear to create an outdoor scene.

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Town Hall

North Atrium

Nothing at this time.

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Trafalgar Park Community Centre

Octagon for Trafalgar Park, Laura Marotta, 2018 (stainless steel)

With its polished stainless steel surfaces and geometric lines, the large-scale structure is designed to be a social hub that invites exploration and reflection by visitors as they move around the piece and view it from its many angles.

An independent selection committee made up of visual arts professionals and community representatives selected Marotta’s sculpture through a Public Art Call process as outlined as part of the town’s Art Policy.

Laura Marotta is a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) graduate from the University of Guelph. Her artwork has been featured in curated exhibitions, festivals and public art commissions. For more information about the artist visit laura-marotta.com

Main Corridor

ArtWorks Oakville – Artists Choice

February 24 to December 20, 2021

Multi Purpose Room 2

Mary Lyons and Frances Tyrell

Indoor Track Corridor

Oakville Camera Club

Questions?

Please contact Tonia Di Risio, Program Supervisor – Culture, at 905-845-6601, ext. 4614 or public.art@oakville.ca.

There are no current calls for proposal.

Main Gallery

Hours of operation:

• Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
• Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

November 6-28

ArtWorks Oakville – Annual Juried Show

Display Area

David McClyment – This is Mine

Corridor Galleries

Individual Artists

Anna Lefsrud – Live Music, Cork Floats, Small Seven

Kristina Bradt – Lucky Numbers

Groups

ArtWorks Oakville – Member Show

Oakville Camera Club – A Year in Transition: Member Exhibition

Selected works from the corporate collection

 

Youth

Skye Stachowski – Skye’s Eye

Oakville Museum

Satellite Space

Read Me a Story: Fables and Fairy Tales

Elders have taught children important life lessons through storytelling since time began. Through museum artifacts, we take a whimsical look at reoccurring themes found in fables and fairy tales from a long, long time ago.

QEPCCC offers free corridor exhibition space for youth artists!

Are you a young artist between the ages of 11 and 19 looking for space to exhibit your work? The Youth Corridor Galleries at QEPCCC provide a platform for emerging youth artists and students in the community at large.

We are interested in showcasing original artwork, and giving youth the opportunity to gain valuable experience in the exhibition process, to install and display their works, and even opportunities to sell their artwork.

For more information, please contact the Recreation Assistant at QEP Youth Centre at oakvilleyouth@oakville.ca or 905-845-6601, ext. 4681.

The Town of Oakville’s Recreation and Culture facilities welcome exhibition proposals from professional, local, emerging artists, instructors, students, and culture groups in the areas of fine art, craft, and digital arts for temporary public exhibitions.

We have two kinds of exhibition spaces

Exhibiting in the Corridor Galleries at QEPCCC and Trafalgar Park Community Centre is free. The preferred duration of group and solo shows in our open corridors is three to four months.

• For an overview of the facility, open the QEPCCC Corridor Galleries map (pdf).
• For details on each corridor, including measurements and wall texture, open the QEPCCC Corridor Galleries Guide (pdf).

The Main Gallery at QEPCCC presents professional artwork by local artists for a fee. Content ranges from historical to contemporary themes. Exhibitions may also include works by national and international artists and exhibitions proposed by curators or collectives.

• Rental rates range from $275 to $375 weekly for a minimum of three weeks.
• Open the Main Gallery floor plan (pdf).

The Exhibitions Committee reviews proposals twice a year. Application due dates are February 1 and September 1.

Application forms and submission requirements

For more information, please open the:

• Temporary Corridors Exhibition Purpose and Procedures (pdf)
• QEPCCC Main Gallery Exhibition Purpose and Procedures (pdf)

Applications must include:

• Exhibition Application Form (pdf).
• Written proposal with details regarding the issues or ideas explored, as well as the type of medium and format of the works to be exhibited, in three paragraphs or less.
• Five to ten images of your work on USB drive, CD and/or DVD. Images must be PC compatible in JPEG format, and a maximum of 1 MB file size (maximum resolution of 1024x768 pixels at 72dpi). Do not submit PowerPoint presentations, PDFs or large TIFF files. Do not send original artwork!
• A corresponding image list. Label all materials and list the works numerically, indicating each title, year of production, materials used and overall dimensions.
• Provide a current curriculum vitae (resume) listing your training/education, exhibitions, grants/awards and other professional art experience (three pages maximum).

Mail or deliver applications to:

Gallery Submissions
Culture Coordinator
Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre
Town of Oakville
2302 Bridge Road
Oakville, ON  L6L 2G6
qepexhibitions@oakville.ca

Contact the Queen Elizabeth Community and Cultural Centre at 905-815-5979 for more information.

The Exhibitions Review Committee helps staff to adjudicate exhibition applications for corridor/gallery displays and exhibitions. The purpose of the committee is to:

• Review all applications for exhibitions.
• Offer constructive comment concerning the exhibition applications and to recommend applications to town staff for exhibition.

The purpose of the exhibition program for the Main Gallery at QEPCCC and Corridor Galleries is to:

• Continually showcase creative work to the public that is important to the community.
  Priority for exhibitions will be to exhibit professional artwork by local artists in the areas of fine art, craft, performance art and digital arts, which range in content from historical to contemporary themes. Exhibitions may also include works by national and international artists and exhibitions proposed by curators.
• Provide a combination of gallery rentals and exhibitions organized by town staff including partnerships with internal organizations.

Artists are given the opportunity to display their works through an application process. Visit the Exhibition Calls tab on this page for more information.

Nominations for positions on the committee shall be sought from the community at large with a preference for demonstrated knowledge of arts and culture in Oakville, reflective of our programs and members.

Contact the Cultural Supervisor at tonia.dirisio@oakville.ca for the Terms of Reference for the Exhibitions Review Committee and to submit nominations.

Town Hall

1225 Trafalgar Road

North Atrium

Alvin Tan – Blooming, 1974

Azhar Shemdin – Reflections in Blue, 1991

John Alford - The Sinking of U-94, 1983

Karl Woetz – Avancez

Michel Foucault – Le Bucheron, 1988

Neville Palmer – Standing Form (After Noguchi), 1974

Neville Palmer – Vertical, 1974

Selections from the Corporate Gifts collection from our Sister Cities: Huai’an, China; Neyagawa,Japan; and Dorval, Quebec.

Upper North Atrium

Fred Schopf – Portrait of Allan M. Masson, Mayor, 1966

Ian Lazarus – Maquette for “Falling Up”, 1983 (On loan from Oakville Galleries)

John McKinnon – Maquette for “The Perfect Fit”, 1988 (On loan from Oakville Galleries)

John McEwen – Maquette for “Still Life and Blind” (On loan from Oakville Galleries)

Josef Petriska – Untitled, 1982

Manfred – A Moment of Trust, 1988

Mark Lewis – The Smell of Books, 1993-1994 (On loan from Oakville Galleries)

South Atrium

Josef Petriska – New Life

Upper South Atrium

Tim Rainey – Mystical Presence (East Side)

 

Meeting Rooms

Meeting Room A

Norman Choo – Warm Shower Ends a Day, 2003

Bronte Room

Sydna Bell-Windeyer – Old Bronte Harbour, 1988

Thomas Mathews – Fishing Scene, 1974

Oakville Room

David Newman – Untitled, 1962

Thomas Mathews – MacDougald’s Warehouse

Thomas Mathews – Sixteen Mile Creek, 1967

Sixteen Mile Sports Complex

3070 Neyagawa Boulevard

Liz Pead – Louis Riel and the Church at Batouche, 1885, 2014-2015

Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre

2302 Bridge Road

Thomas Chatfield - Maple Red

Oakville Public Library

Central Branch

120 Navy Street

Almuth Lütkenhaus – Tibetan Girl, 1967 (3rd Floor)

John Willard – Toucans, Tigers and Zebras Oh My! (2nd Floor)

Ronald Arnott Baird – Gates (Various locations)

Thomas Chatfield – Montreal River (3rd Floor)

George McElroy – Easter in Early Oakville

George McElroy – Trotting Races on the Sixteen

George McElroy – Shipbuilding on the Sixteen

George McElroy – The “Radial” Crossing on the Sixteen

Woodside Branch

1274 Rebecca Street

Gwyneth Young – Untitled, 1962