Fall 2025 ARTbus Tour

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Program Description

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, Metamorphoses: Visions of Antiquity in the Modern Era and Taking Root: Recent Acquisitions. 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.

Program Schedules and Details

12:00 PM – Attendees meet and depart at ROM bus lane (100 Queen’s Park)

1:15 PM – Arrival at the Art Gallery of Hamilton

Exhibition: Metamorphoses: Visions of Antiquity in the Modern Era & Taking Root: Recent Acquisitions

2:45 PM – bus departs the Art Gallery of Hamilton for Centennial Square in Oakville.

3:30 PM – Arrival at Centennial Square.

Exhibition: Hold Your Breath

4:00 PM – bus departs Centennial Gallery for Gairloch Gardens in Oakville.

4:15 PM – arrival at Gairloch Gardens.

Exhibition: A Door handle, a Handshake

Refreshments and small bites will be provided.

5:00 PM – bus departs for Toronto

6:30 PM – Final Drop Off at ROM bus lane

Hugo Canoilas: Hold Your Breath

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.

Andreia Santana: A Door handle, A Handshake

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.

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, Metamorphoses Visions of Antiquity in the Modern Era and Taking Root: Recent Acquisitions. 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.