Public Art and Exhibitions

Painting Exhibition by Maria Birau

Glen Abbey Community Centre

Maria Birau started painting during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she took online painting classes and taught herself techniques. Her work is an expression of nature, sunlight, and bright colours of seasonal changes. She hopes her art will inspire viewers to explore and connect with nature.

A Blend of Nature and Life by Mohamad Anis Mansour

Oakville Trafalgar Community Centre

Mohamad Anis Mansour holds a bachelor’s degree in art from Damascus University and is deeply engaged in the world of creativity, exploring a wide range of artistic mediums, from the expressive strokes of traditional painting to the intricate techniques of ink drawing. His work spans multiple themes, including abstract expressionism, the complex narratives of humanity, and the awe-inspiring beauty of the natural world. This exhibition, A Blend of Nature and Life, showcases paintings and drawings inspired by nature, still life, and cityscapes.

Oakville Quilters Guild

Trafalgar Park Community Centre

The Oakville Quilters Guild was established in 1994 and now has a membership of approximately 80 people. Our members include beginner quilters as well as internationally renowned artists. This exhibition is a collection that features many fibre and textile art techniques, including applique, beading, collage, embellishment, fabric stained-glass, hand embroidery, machine embroidery, machine quilting and stitching, and raw-edge applique.

Explore community Connextions throughout Oakville

Our temporary public art project, Connextions, is on display!

New works of art are featured on prominent windows at recreation facilities to build community spirit and reflect on the idea of reconnecting.

Main Gallery

Community show

Faces of Culture - A community sketchbook project

September 19 to October 12, 2025

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

Corridors

Black History Display – Oakville’s Black History

Corporate Collection – Selected Works

Ebru Winegard – The Yellow Umbrella Chronicles

Ellie Azimian – Life Flowing: Whispers of Nature

Jenny Kim – A Fusion of the Arts

Joachim & Carina Berkmanns – Nature rediscovered

Melissa Bieman – Threaded Patterns

Oakville Camera Club – Capture Oakville 2025

Oakville Fibre Artists – Twilight

Oakville Quilters' Guild – Surprize Bag Charity Fun Challenge

Sharzhad Amin, Yvette Garcia-Mier, Lauren Sinett – Harmony in Cultures

Simon Palmer – Looking Through Paint

Youth Corridors

Harini Ganesh – Natures of Desire

Kerry Chen – Kerry’s World in Color 

Yilin Guo – Fantasy Elf 

Oakville Museum Satellite Space

It Belongs in a Museum! How and Why Museums Collect and Preserve 

On display from February 2025 to January 2026

Town Hall, 1225 Trafalgar Road

North Atrium

• Alvin Tan – Blooming, 1974
• 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 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

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

• Centennial Square at 120 Navy Street
• Gairloch Gallery at 1306 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 many public artworks that integrate technology and the natural environment. Widgery’s Wind Bower is located just steps away from the main entrance of Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens. This interactive and immersive work captures the shifting sights and sounds of the garden. The open structure of metal rods with a seating area and a canopy of softly tinkling wind chimes, 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 (18 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.