Andreia Santana

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 engage directly with the gallery architecture and its surrounding environment.

The exhibition title quotes Juhani Pallasmaa's expression from the 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. With a practice focused mainly on sculpture, Andreia Santana’s works are often marked by a minimalist approach. Her sculptures tend to convey a sense of fragility and vulnerability while expressing 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. This interaction between her works and the human body gives rise to a new dimension of engagement, expanding the artistic experience. 

Consciously arranged in the gallery space, these translucent metal mesh sculptures integrate the interior architecture of the space and the external landscape of the garden, while also revealing almost invisible glass elements within their interiors. Exploring themes of authorship, gender, and the relationship between language and the self, the exhibition evokes the oeuvres of several Canadian authors, including Lisa Robertson’s first novel The Baudelaire Fractal  and Ron Baird's commissioned public art works and interventions from the 1970s to the 1980s.