The Oakville Galleries fall 2017 exhibits will be presented to the public on September 24. FASTWÜRMS will be featured in Gairloch Gardens with the opening scheduled from 3:30 to 5:30 pm. Tamara Henderson: Seasons End: Out of Body will be in Centennial Square with the opening scheduled from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm.
FASTWÜRMS
FASTWÜRMS (Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse) have developed an influential poly-disciplinary art practice over the past four decades. In #Q33R_WTCH_P155, a new site-specific project, the joint authorship reimagines and transforms Gairloch Gardens, suggesting an alternate queer-witch history for the site as Warlok Gardens.
In this narrative, Warlok Gardens functioned from 1943-1944 as the cover location and code name for an ultra secret allied military intelligence unit, UR BZRK Warlok. Its members, thirteen witches, worked closely with Doreen Valiente (code breaker and mother of modern witchcraft) and Alan Turing (computer scientist, cryptanalyst and philosopher), both agents at Bletchley Park—a central site for British code breakers during World War II—to unlock the Nazi enigma machine and win the war.
Seeing into the future, the UR BZRK Warlok broke with the military to make new codes and tools to tackle war and hate, climate change, and create another future where “Love is the Law." Initiating a visionary war against war, they pursued a plan for political and social change, including universal economic and social justice, sexual and gender liberation, the dismantling of all oppressions, imperialisms and colonialisms, to ultimately create a polymorphous polycultural utopia.
In Warlok Gardens, FASTWÜRMS bring together speculative operational models alongside objects they actively use. Reflecting on our past, present and future they create a space that is at once fictional and historical.
Tamara Henderson: Seasons End: Out of Body
Henderson will be showing an installation that marks a major transition in her work. Developed during a residency in Scotland in 2015, Seasons End is an itinerant, multi-part installation that has been staged in Glasgow, Los Angeles and London. On its final stop in Oakville, Out of Body expands on these previous presentations, bringing together an assortment of objects and materials collected by the artist on her recent travels. These range from fabrics bought in Athens and dyed with plants gathered on a Greek island to objects crafted from the Bay of Fundy mudflats.
At the center of the installation is a cast of human-like figures robed in colourful, embroidered costumes and wearing hand-made shoes. With a makeshift vehicle and passports at hand, they appear poised to traverse borders, be they physical or spiritual, like a crowd of spectral bodies who have made the ultimate transition from one world into another. Henderson's voyagers weave together an intensely personal story of travel between countries and states of being, of material alchemy and transformation, and of slipping between worlds, particularly from the world of matter and flesh to one that is “out of body."
Produced by REDCAT and Glasgow International with support from Oakville Galleries, Serpentine Galleries, and Rodeo. The artist wishes to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Costumes designed and produced with Aude Levere. Sound design by Dan Riley. With special thanks also to Jake Tilbury.
The Oakville Galleries Fall 2017 exhibits will run until December 30, 2017.