Oakville Galleries presents Two Truths and a Lie, a group exhibition drawn primarily from the art galleries' permanent collection which will take place at the galleries in Gairloch Gardens and at Centennial Square.
The exhibition gathers both well-known and less familiar works by 18 artists represented in the collection, including Colin Campbell, Donna James, Spring Hurlbut, Liz Magor, Olia Mischenko, David Rokeby, Jin-me Yoon, and more. On view for the first time are a selection of new and recent acquisitions, including works by Derek Sullivan, Sojourner Truth Parsons, and Tanya Lukin Linklater.
The addition of these works amplify the collecting priorities of Oakville Galleries as we continue to expand the collection in new ways. The exhibition title, ‘Two Truths and a Lie,’ is an icebreaker game that involves stating three possible propositions about oneself: two that are true and one that is false. Through deception, deduction, and disclosure, the players become better acquainted with one another.
The works included in Two Truths and a Lie speak to the complex interactions within the pursuit of truth—personal, visual, or social. Exploring these processes as ways of knowing, the exhibition highlights the different ways in which narratives come into being.
The exhibition builds on the conceit of the game, featuring artists who are concerned with self-presentation, narratology, and language. For instance, central within many works is the question of how narration contributes to self and identity. Rather than examining the ethics of truth-telling or duplicity, these works inquire into the power of personal narratives, building from the autobiographical to the autofictional, from documentary to fabulation.
Other artists manipulate form to ask similar questions of where to draw a line between the authentic and inauthentic, the interior and exterior—what lies beneath the surface.
Through diverse techniques and mediums, these artists participate in the confessional as much as they slip into the hidden and fictional. Within these layers of thought, the artists also probe at assumptions and broaden the limits of understanding, guiding us towards more expansive ways of seeing and being in relations.
As a prelude to the upcoming exhibition, Oakville Galleries commissioned artist Erdem Taşdelen to create Demagogues: 6, a site-specific photographic print located at Centennial Square in Oakville. Displayed in the public square from 29 July – 6 September 2021, Demagogues: 6 asked viewers to interrogate beliefs held about the image and to consider the effect of deception and the possibility of locating common truths.
As a series, Demagogues questions the authenticity of what is visible in the public realm. Each iteration of the work, whether a billboard or a framed print, is a photograph of the very site it is displayed in and features the following sentence translated into the local language: If a man tells me something I believe to be an untruth, am I forbidden to do more than congratulate him on the brilliance of his lying? Taken at face value, the image seems to document the presence of this text at the site at some earlier point in time. But in fact what's displayed is fake, as the text has been inserted into the photograph via digital manipulation.
Exhibiting artists include Stephen Andrews, Valérie Blass, Colin Campbell, Stan Denniston, General Idea, Spring Hurlbut, Donna James, Micah Lexier, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Liz Magor, Olia Mishchenko, Louise Noguchi, Sojourner Truth Parsons, David Rokeby, Cheryl Sourkes, Lisa Steele, Derek Sullivan, Erdem Taşdelen, and Jin-me Yoon.