Oakville Galleries is delighted to announce the opening of our fall exhibitions: Beolle — the first solo museum exhibition by Toronto-based artist Laurie Kang—and Agouti Sky, a solo exhibition of new work by Toronto-based artist Georgia Dickie.
Please join Oakville Galleries to celebrate the opening of these exhibitions on Sunday 6 October from 2:30 pm–3:30 pm at Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square, followed by a reception at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens from 3:30 pm–5:00 pm.
6 October 2019 – 5 January 2020
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
The work of Toronto-based artist Laurie Kang is rooted in an enduring concern with the body and the ways it is shaped through political and social contexts. Drawing on fields such as biology, feminist theory and science fiction, Kang’s sculptures evoke the body in process, using unstable, continuously sensitive materials that change over the course of the exhibition to stage scenes that are in a constant state of flux.
In recent years, Kang has become known for her site-responsive wall sculptures, in which industrial materials such as steel studs and drywall track are erected and skinned with exposed photographic papers to render sculptures that are both visceral and speculative. Here, in her first solo museum exhibition, Kang presents a series of seemingly deconstructed forms—less a structure and more a construction site—that turn away from the upright and toward the horizontal.
Titled Beolle—Korean for “worm”—the exhibition largely grazes the floor, existing in a state between form and decay. From swarms of fermentation vessels and scattered casts of vegetal matter to knots of larval forms, each of the works in the exhibition alludes to processes of “becoming”—biological, social and otherwise.
The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
Free exhibition tours:
Saturday 12 October 2019, 3:00 pm
Saturday 9 November 2019, 3:00 pm
Saturday 14 December 2019, 3:00 pm
6 October 2019 – 5 January 2020
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square
For her exhibition Agouti Sky, Toronto-based artist Georgia Dickie has brought a host of objects off the street and into the gallery. Staging, grouping, balancing, and placing are a primary focus of this artist’s practice, activities that makes her presence integral to the presentation of the work.
Agouti Sky stages Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square as a landscape of sorts, made up of the bric-a-brac refuse of society built to consume and discard. A baby chair, boxing gloves, a scrap of lace, a satellite dish: Dickie painstakingly reorders these objects we so easily toss aside into choreographed compositions resembling a reef, a horizon line, and “fields” of conglomerate objects.
She rarely alters her materials, choosing instead to present them as they are, either singled out for individual attention or swept into a larger ecology of forms. Displaced from their original contexts and stripped bare of their prior purpose and use, some of these items become unfamiliar and strange. All we can know of them is what we see now: their material characteristics, colour, texture, and form. These are often the cues that inform the work’s composition, the colour orange or the bend of a wooden beam, for example, signalling the assembly of other structures and shapes.
As with much of Dickie’s work, these installations will be dismantled entirely at the end of an exhibition, with many items returning to the studio to be reconfigured at a later date. A delicately poised composition held together just for now, Agouti Sky offers a parallel to our own fragile world, one seemingly sliding towards imminent environmental collapse.
The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
Free exhibition tours:
Saturday 12 October 2019, 2:00 pm
Saturday 9 November 2019, 2:00 pm
Saturday 14 December 2019, 2:00 pm
ABOUT LAURIE KANG
Laurie Kang (b. 1985, Toronto) holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions of her work include Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge; Interstate Projects, New York; Gallery TPW & Franz Kaka, Toronto; and Raster Gallery, Warsaw. Her work has been included in group projects at venues such as Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Cue Art Foundation, New York; L’inconnue, Montreal; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Poland; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; and Camera Austria, Graz. She has been artist-in-residence at Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Alberta; and the Art Gallery of Ontario.
ABOUT GEORGIA DICKIE
Georgia Dickie (b.1989, Toronto, Canada) graduated with a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2011. Recent exhibitions include Jeffrey Stark, New York City, Springsteen, Baltimore; V1 Gallery, Copenhagen; Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, USA; Rolando Anselmi, Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Cooper Cole Gallery, The Power Plant, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. In February 2015, she was the Canada Council for the Arts artist in residence at Acme Studios in London, UK.