Public Art and Exhibitions

Explore community Connextions throughout Oakville

Our temporary public art project, Connextions, is on display until the end of 2023!

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

Competition and Companionship by artist Ning Yang

A new site-specific mural is located in the front foyer at River Oaks Community Centre.

With a cultivated interest in culture, storytelling, and image-making, artist Ning Yang is a participant of the CreateSpace Public Art Residency, a partnership between Sustainable Thinking and Expression on Public Space (STEPS) and the Town of Oakville.

Fruit of My Passions by Paul Dias

Glen Abbey Community Centre, Fitness Centre Corridor

Paul Dias is Jamaican-born and raised, with a passion for colour and all things captivating. "Canada has offered me a unique opportunity to express that passion through my art. The four distinctly different but undeniably beautiful Canadian seasons have mesmerized me since my arrival. Consequently, I am always attempting to illustrate my impressions of the beautiful north... It’s simply breathtaking, and I have spent the past 12 years attempting to document its beauty on canvas and many other surfaces."

The Oakville Camera Club

Oakville Public Library, Glen Abbey Branch

The Oakville Camera Club focuses on bringing together local photographers of all ages and skill levels to socialize and learn at Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre. A friendly, open club, they feature interesting speakers, photo outings, workshops, peer-critiqued photo challenges and public exhibitions.

Founded in 2006, the Oakville Camera Club filled a gap in the local arts community where photographers could share their passion. The club has grown from 24 members in the first year to over 100 members today.

ArtWorks Oakville

Oakville Trafalgar Community Centre

ArtWorks Oakville is dedicated to promoting and showcasing visual artists at public spaces throughout Oakville and the surrounding area. The variety of art styles and continually changing exhibitions enrich participating public and private spaces At each site, patrons and employees can enjoy unique creations.

ArtWorks Oakville works enthusiastically on behalf of emerging local visual artists by providing public exhibition sites where their work is displayed and enjoyed by the public. They offer venues and social media outlets for artists to promote, showcase and sell their work.

One Foggy Evening by Brian Groberman

Trafalgar Park Community Centre

One Foggy Evening explores the dynamics within our urban parks and recreational areas with photographs that depict the diverse and dynamic range of a foggy fall evening.

Brian Groberman is a photographer based in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton area. He incorporates a variety of photographic technology and techniques, both traditional film formats, and recently added digital formats. Groberman uses digital technology for scanning and post-production including compositing techniques that enhance the ambience and sculpting of detail within the image.

Pigment printing on a variety of fine art archival papers adds complimentary textures. The final imagery combines both fluidity and passage of time. This process is illustrated within a number of city and urban landscapes, rural vistas and panoramas.

Main Gallery and Corridors

Gallery hours:

• Monday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
• Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

Please note: The Main Gallery will be closed from December 23 to 26, 2023, and December 30, 2023, to January 1, 2024.

World of Threads

Exhibition extended! October 10, 2023, to January 14, 2024

The World of Threads Festival is a leading international showcase of contemporary fibre and textile art featuring exciting and compelling pieces by remarkable Canadian and International artists.

After a long hiatus during Covid, the festival has returned with artists from around the world invited to submit bodies of work, installations or individual pieces. The curators, Gareth Bate and Dawne Rudman, have created different thematic group exhibitions, solo shows and installations throughout Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre.

Explore 423 artworks by 114 artists from Canada, England, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Israel, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay, USA, and US Virgin Islands. For more information, please visit World of Threads Festival website.

Oakville Museum Satellite Space

Open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Seven Glorious Virtues

Through to 2024

Ancient philosophers deemed certain virtues necessary for a happy individual. These virtues were also necessary in creating a good society. Achieving goodness or virtue is something that must be cultivated every day through one's actions. Learn about some of the glorious virtues of historic Oakville residents who have contributed to society, personified through artifacts in the museum’s permanent collection.

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 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 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 (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.

We 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.

Applications must include:

• Exhibition Application Form (pdf)
• Word document or PDF with 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 JPEG images of your work sent via email or delivered 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). PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, PDFs or large TIFF files will not be accepted. Do not send original artwork.
• Word document or PDF with a corresponding image list. Label all materials and list the works numerically, indicating each title, year of production, materials used and overall dimensions.
• Word document or PDF with a current resume listing your training/education, exhibitions, grants/awards and other professional art experience. Please keep qualifications to a three-page maximum.

Email your application to qepexhibitions@oakville.ca. You may also mail or deliver applications to:

Gallery Submissions
Cultural Coordinator
Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre
Town of Oakville
2302 Bridge Road
Oakville, ON L6L 2G6

Corridor galleries

Exhibiting in the Corridor Galleries at QEPCCC and Trafalgar Park Community Centre is free. The 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).

QEPCCC main gallery

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 $285 to $389 weekly for a minimum of three weeks.

Open the Main Gallery floor plan (pdf).

Policies and procedures

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

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

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 provides 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.

Application forms and submission requirements

A complete application for an exhibition in the Youth Corridor will consist of:

• Pages 3 and 4 of the Youth Exhibition Application Form (pdf) filled in.
• Word document or PDF with a short description of your artwork. Discuss the content of the work, both conceptually (issues or ideas explored) and physically (type of medium and format). Please also outline why you would like to exhibit your work at QEPCCC.
• One JPEG image of each work you are proposing to display. Images must be PC compatible in JPEG format, a maximum of 1 MB file size, a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 72dpi. Please do not submit PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, PDFs, or large Tiff files. Do not send original artwork.
• Word document or PDF with a corresponding image list. Label all materials and numerically list the work, with the title.

Email your application to qepexhibitions@oakville.ca. You may also mail or deliver applications to:

Gallery Submissions
Cultural Coordinator
Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre
Town of Oakville
2302 Bridge Road
Oakville, ON L6L 2G6

After receiving notification of acceptance by email, applicants must return a signed Exhibitor’s Agreement and Guidelines. A general information meeting is scheduled with town staff thereafter.

Email qepexhibitions@oakville.ca for more information.

2024-2025 exhibitions at Oakville community and cultural centre galleries

Deadline: February 1, 2024

The Town of Oakville welcomes proposals from artists, collectives, curators and community groups in the areas of fine art, craft, performance art and digital arts for exhibition spaces in either the Main Gallery at Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre (QEPCCC) and/or the Corridor Galleries in other Oakville facilities.

The Exhibitions Review Committee reviews proposals twice a year. The 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.

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.