Winter 2024 ARTbus: Exhibition Tour
Saturday 3 February 2024, 11:30 am–5:30 pm
Pick-up at 401 Richmond, drop-off at Mercer Union in Toronto.
In partnership with Gallery 44 and Mercer Union, Oakville Galleries invites you to join us for the Winter ARTbus tour of four exhibitions. Beginning with Gallery 44, visitors will tour Stephanie Comilang’s solo exhibition How to Make a Painting from Memory, the ARTbus will continue to Mercer Union to tour Lovers’ Wind, an exhibition by artists Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko. Then it’s off to Oakville Galleries, where participants will attend the opening reception of solo exhibitions Sung Tieu: Civic Floor at Oakville Galleries in Centennial Square and Tarik Kiswanson: Prelude at Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens. Artist Tarik Kiswanson will be in attendance for the reception in Gairloch Gardens, where visitors will enjoy afternoon refreshments and an exhibition walk-through.
GALLERY 44
Our winter ARTbus begins at Gallery 44 in Toronto with Stephanie Comilang’s solo exhibition How to Make a Painting from Memory. Home and community figure prominently in Stephanie Comilang's composite installation of sculpture, still and moving images; communal architectures—whether built structures or the interdependency of people in place—are malleable, nomadic containers of memory and belonging. Grounded in a familiar Filipino image of the Bayanihan (men carrying wooden nipa, referencing the spirit of cooperation and being in-community), Thai female migrant storytellers in an adjacent film, whose vocalized memories of their family homes are also rendered as 3D-printed spirit houses, the exhibition elucidates concepts of communal unity, cooperation and the protective spirit of place as modes of diasporic home-making, reciprocity, trust and relationality. Executive Director Alana Traficante will lead a visitors’ tour of the exhibition.
MERCER UNION
Next, the ARTbus will visit Lovers’ Wind. The collaborative filmmaking practice of Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, and Ryan Ferko explores tensions and uncertainties within images to surface critical perspectives on collective memory and the historical trace. Working between speculation, historical fiction, and documentation, the artists’ projects often excavate existing narratives to uncover the power relations and subjectivities shaped by them. Their exhibition, Lovers’ Wind, takes its starting point from the helicopter crash at Karaj Dam near Tehran that killed French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse in 1970, during the production of Le Vent des Amoureux (Bād-e Sabā, 1978), a state-funded documentary about Iran. Mercer Union staff will provide a short introduction to the exhibition, followed by time for viewing the video works.
OAKVILLE GALLERIES at CENTENNIAL SQUARE
Lastly, at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens and at Centennial Square, the ARTbus will visit the opening of Sung Tieu: Civic Floor and Tarik Kiswanson: Prelude.
Drawing upon extensive research, Sung Tieu produces works of sculpture, drawing, text and sound. Her work explores questions of governance, civic responsibility and justice, and analyzes mechanisms of state control. Her research ventures into the quiet violence of bureaucratic systems in particular and how these systems impact people psychologically and emotionally. Her work has itself sometimes taken the form of reconstructions of sites of bureaucratic control and surveillance, even referencing her personal experiences with various administrative apparatuses.
OAKVILLE GALLERIES in GAIRLOCH GARDENS
At 3:30 pm, artist Tarik Kiswanson and Oakville Galleries Executive Director Séamus Kealy will lead an exhibition walk-through of Prelude. The 2023 winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, Tarik Kiswanson produces sculpture, writing, performance, drawing, sound, and video works. Notions of rootlessness, regeneration, and renewal are central themes in his oeuvre. Always operating at the intersection of different cultural contexts, his various abstract works examine subjects related to memory, heritage, birth, loss and belonging. His oeuvre can be understood as a cosmology of related conceptual families, each exploring variations on themes such as refraction, multiplication, disintegration, levitation, hybridity, and polyphony through their own distinct language.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Schedule:
11:30 am – Attendees meet at Gallery 44
Exhibition: Stephanie Comilang: How to Make a Painting from Memory
12:10 pm - bus departs 401 Richmond for Mercer Union
12:30 pm - arrival at Mercer Union
Exhibition: Lovers' Wind (Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko)
1:30 pm - Bus departs Mercer Union (Toronto) for Oakville
2:10 - 2:30 pm - Arrival to Oakville at Centennial
Exhibition: Sung Tieu: Civic Floor
3:00 pm - Art Bus departs for Gairloch Gardens
3:10 pm - Arrival to Gairloch Gardens
Exhibition: Tarik Kiswanson: Prelude
3:30 pm - Walk-through with Tarik and Seamus for Prelude
4:30 pm - Bus departs Gairloch for Toronto
5:10 - 5:30 pm - Bus arrives back to Mercer Union
Venues
Gallery 44
401 Richmond St W #120, Toronto
416.979.3941
Gallery44.org
Mercer Union
1286 Bloor St W, Toronto
416.536.1519
Mercerunion.org
Oakville Galleries
Oakville Galleries at Centennial Square: 120 Navy St, Oakville
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens: 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville
905.844.4402
