Oakville Galleries presents WOLF TONES: A Many-Sided House
January 28 – May 13, 2023
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
Tuesday – Saturday: 10 AM – 5 PM
Mondays: Available by Appointment
Closed Sundays and Statutory Holidays
A Many-Sided House is the first exhibition in Canada of work by Wolf Tones (currently Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Sterrett Smith, Pradeep Dalal, and David Levi Strauss), a collaborative group of US-based artists, convened in 2019 by Nancy Shaver, that has been creating densely constructed installations over the past four years. Working separately and together, these artists gather, borrow, and exchange their works throughout Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens. Wolf Tones presents meditations on the handmade, the anonymous, connection and exchange, difference and recurrence, material histories, the lake, flotsam, and the movement and circulation of images, objects, and materials.
Growing up in Appleton, on the other side of Lake Ontario, Shaver draws from personal history as an explorer returning to observe a place of origin. Goldfarb’s sculptures—shipping models, navigational tools, and driftwood—guide our attention to the lake views through the windows and so to wider economies and patterns of circulatory movement. Working with fabrics, ceramics, paint and Aqua resin, while incorporating found and salvaged materials—such as wood, cardboard, feathers, chicken wire, and Styrofoam—Sterrett Smith’s works embrace the provisional and the propositional in a restless commitment to the act of making itself. Dalal’s installation mines the idea of textiles as territories. In a series of lens-based works, he photographs and re-photographs images of fabrics, nudging our visual and sensual modes of perception. Mobile Library Unit for A Many-Sided House, is a contribution by writer David Levi Strauss that engages the poetics and politics of attentive looking.
About Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries is located on Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and the Haudenosaunee. As an institution, Oakville Galleries recognizes the importance of establishing and maintaining meaningful and respectful relationships with the original inhabitants and keepers of the land, and we are grateful for the opportunity to operate on this territory.