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.
Access Exhibition Handout PDF
Sign Up to Pre-Order Wolf Tones' Publication
For the duration of the Wolf Tones' exhibition, Oakville Galleries is pleased to provide our visitors with the opportunity to purchase the publication "Wolf Tones" (2022) published by Soberscove Press. Contributions from Nancy Shaver, Maximilian Goldfarb, Sterrett Smith, Stan Allen, Charles Curtis, Pradeep Dalal, Stacy Wakefield Forte, Anna Friz, Julia Klein, Ann Lauterbach, Catherine Lord, Matana Roberts, and David Levi Strauss. At this time, we have a limited number of books available for purchase. Please inquire with reception at the gallery. We encourage you to sign up to pre-order your copy to be notified of arrival of the next shipment of this popular publication.
Charles Curtis Performance
Wednesday, 15 March 2023 | The Studio
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens
6:00 – 8:00 PM
6 – 6:30 PM | View the exhibition, Wolf Tones: A Many-Sided House in Gairloch Gardens
6:45 PM | Doors open at The Studio (located to the right of the gallery) to ticket holders
7:00 PM | Welcome, Introduction and Performance by Charles Curtis
View full details and purchase tickets!
In conjunction with Wolf Tones: A Many-Sided House, cellist Charles Curtis will give an evening performance in The Studio at Gairloch Gardens on Wednesday, 15 March 2023. Curtis will perform a series of compositions that engage the cello as a site of uncertainty, a physical and acoustical object to be explored in performance, without advance knowledge of what the exploration might yield. While clearly framed as performative tasks, the compositions are inherently incomplete, and permeable to the material and spatial conditions at hand.
In 2003 – 2005, Curtis collaborated with French composer Éliane Radigue on Naldjorlak, a concert-length solo work in which the entire cello is tuned to the “wolf tone", a musical phenomenon that occurs with stringed instruments when certain notes resonate at the same frequency as the instrument itself, creating an uneven quivering or wolf-like “howl."
For the artist group Wolf Tones, this double resonance serves as an analogy for the visual interplay of their ongoing artistic collaboration. In a recent book on the Wolf Tones, Curtis wrote: “The force and unruly richness of the wolf mean that we must approach it with care and attentiveness, rather than domination. Its variability means that we hear it anew each time, each time in different and specific dimensions, each time as an exception: a unique aesthetic moment expressed in wave energy."
