(As quoted from Oakville Galleries’ website): Oakville Galleries presents the exhibition Between Heaven and Earth by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov at both of our gallery locations. The grand opening on Saturday May 31 will feature a concert by young performers, presented in Gairloch Gardens.
Between Heaven and Earth highlights a number of the artists’ works, including paintings, prints and installations, and spills out into the gardens with several larger artworks. The largest installation is The Ship of Tolerance, a 60-foot long, hand-crafted wooden ship with sails made from children’s paintings, presented lakeside in Gairloch Gardens for one year. Now, marking its 20th anniversary, its first appearance in Canada takes place at a critical time where a crossroads towards a new global order is visible.
In Oakville, over 2,000 children from local schools and diverse community groups have played a part in creating The Ship of Tolerance project to date. These young participants converse together about inclusivity, different cultures, respect and creative ideas of the future, then they create paintings that express their visions of tolerance and how that shapes our collective future. A selection of the resulting paintings are sewn together to create the sail for the ship, while the remaining paintings are displayed in various locations in Oakville.
