Oakville Galleries | Fall 2025 Exhibition Opening

Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens

A Door Handle, A Handshake is Andreia Santana's first solo exhibition in North America. Developed during her residency at Oakville Galleries, the exhibition features a new series of sculptures that respond directly to the gallery architecture and surrounding environment.

The exhibition title quotes Juhani Pallasmaa from her book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, as a metaphorical comparison emphasizing the first tactile impression a person has with a building. Just as a handshake can portray a sense of someone's character, a door handle communicates and reinforces its connection to the user, and the architectural experience through touch, material, and design. Consciously arranged in the gallery space, her translucent, metal-mesh sculptures integrate the interior architecture of the space and the external landscape of the garden, while also revealing near-invisible glass elements within their interiors. Exploring themes of authorship, gender, and the relationship between language and the self, the exhibition references Canadian author Lisa Robertson’s first novel The Baudelaire Fractal and Canadian artist Ron Baird's commissioned public art works and interventions from the 1970s to the 1980s. With a practice focused mainly on sculpture, Andreia Santana’s works are often marked by a minimalist approach. Her sculptures convey fragility, vulnerability and a poetic force. Her work often explores notions of collective “transcorporeality” and material performativity, utilizing sculpture as a platform for interventions that incorporate movement and action.

Image credit: Andreia Santana, A Door Handle, A Handshake, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square

Hold Your Breath is Hugo Canoilas’ first solo exhibition in Canada. The exhibition presents an enormous, amorphous painting covering the entire Centennial Gallery space. Visitors are guided throughout this installation, encouraged to explore and walk over the artwork. The material, arrangement and mise en scene of Hold Your Breath was initially developed as an operatic set for Kunsthaus Bregenz and the Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Austria. This new presentation at Oakville Galleries reflects Canoilas's practice of revising and recontextualizing large-scale works to adapt to the context and architecture of different exhibition spaces. Canoilas' immersive work features deep-sea imagery, including a microscopic view of an octopus's skin, a seashell, and a large siphonophore, symbolizing symbiosis and mutualism. The painting installation also consciously contrasts the celestial light of historical painting with the pure white of modern art. Images emerge from the darkness, evoking the mystery of nature.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Federal Chancellery of Austria.

Image credit: Hugo Canoilas, Hold Your Breath, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Join the Tour from Toronto and experience 4 exhibitions in one day!

Pick-up at ROM bus lane, 100 Queen’s Park in Toronto.

$20 registration fee includes transportation to all galleries, refreshments, and complimentary entry with a guided tour at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

In partnership with the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Oakville Galleries invites you to the fall 2025 ARTbus tour. The tour begins at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where participants will visit two exhibitions, Metamorphosis: Visions of Antiquity in the Modern Era and Taking Root. Next, at Oakville Galleries attendees will tour Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath at the Centennial Square, followed by Andreia Santana: A door handle, a handshake in Gairloch Gardens. ARTbus guests will be picked up and dropped off at 100 Queen’s Park ROM bus lane.

Image credits:

Top: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Bacchante with Grapes and Vine Leaves, 1868, bronze with synthetic base. The Joey and Toby Tanenbaum Collection, 2002. © Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Bottom Left: Hugo Canoilas, On the extremes of good and evil, 2021. © Klaus Pichler and MUMOK.⁠

Bottom Right: Eros and Errors, Galeria Avenida da Índia; 2024. All works courtesy the artist and images © EGEAC-Galerias Municipais, Bruno Lopes.

Host or Publisher Oakville Galleries