Oakville Commercial Photographer//Oakville Galleries, Ship of Tolerance, part 2

As artists, we love doing photography and videography work alongside other creatives.

Here’s another glimpse of a massive project we documented with Oakville Galleries, doing photo and video for one of their exhibitions.

(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. 

Oakville Commercial Photographer//Oakville Galleries

One of the many things we love about running a photography and videography business in southern Ontario is that our work takes us to all sorts of different places. One week we might be in our photography studio taking photos of headshot sessions or business branding videos, the next, we might be on-location documenting someone’s small business in action. We love that over the last decade, we’ve done photos and videos for large and small companies, headshots for individuals and corporations, event photography.

Taking photos for the Oakville Galleries and documenting the work of other creatives, is always a highlight.

We adore this exhibition by Hugo Canoilas.

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 and challenge the architecture of each exhibition space. 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 uses ROV spotlights, contrasting the celestial light of historical painting with the pure white of modern art. Images emerge from the darkness through process-driven techniques that mimic nature.