Oakville Galleries Artist in Residence Program

_{Residency Dates: July – October, 2025}

_{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.} 

_{Hugo Canoilas (Lisbon, 1977) lives and works in Vienna. His recent solo presentations include CAV, Coimbra; the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Mumok, Vienna; and the Serralves Museum, Porto. He has participated in institutional exhibitions such as Manifesta 15, Barcelona; Kunstverein in Hamburg; De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg; and the 30th São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo.}

_{In 2025, Canoilas presented "Hold Your Breath," a new opera made in collaboration with Éna Brennan and David Pountney, organized by Kunsthaus Bregenz and Bregenzer Festspielehaus. In 2020 he received the Kapsch-mumok Prize in Vienna and between 2018 and 2021, he organized the collective project "A Gruta" at Galeria Quadrado Azul in Lisbon. He initiated and co-edited the OEI Publication #80-81 "The Zero Alternative: Ernesto de Sousa: Portuguese Art and other aesthetic operators in Portuguese Art and Poetry from 1960's onwards." His work has been reviewed in The Guardian, Público, Expresso, and Der Standard, as well as in online and print magazines such as Mousse Magazine, Art Review, Artforum, Flash Art, Revista Contemporanea, and Umbigo, among others. Canoilas is also the author of numerous texts published in institutional catalogs and in printed and online magazines.}

_{Residency Dates: July – October, 2025}

_{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.}

_{Andreia Santana (Lisbon, 1991) lives and works in New York and Vienna. Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (Porto); Secession (Vienna); CCB (Lisbon); MAAT (Lisbon); In Extenso (Clermont-Ferrand); CIAJG (Guimarães); Hangar (Lisbon); Spazio Leonardo — Generali (Milan); Sans Titre (Paris); Wiener Art Foundation (Vienna); Chiado 8/Culturgest (Lisbon);  UNA (Milan); Filomena Soares Gallery (Lisbon); Scherben (Berlin); Galeria Municipal do Porto; Hunter College Galleries, and Louis Reed (New York).}

_{With a practice focused mainly on sculpture, Andreia Santana’s works are often marked by a minimalist approach that values form and texture. Her sculptures tend to convey a sense of fragility and vulnerability while expressing a poetic force.}

_{Currently, her work 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. Figure and background merge into one thing, as do body and architecture, internal and external space.}

_{Residency Period: July 2025
Participated in our Sunset Kino Program on July 17th, 2025} 

_{Renèe Helèna Browne is an Irish artist working across film, drawing and spoken word. Present in Browne’s work are lived experiences of rurality, labour and religion growing up in the North West of Ireland. They unravel the legacies of these experiences as they pass through storytelling and the gendered body. This is a practice of portraiture, motivated by jealousy, desire, and idolisation. At stake in this process are notions of utopia and failure, embedded in troubled discourses of the ‘homeland’ and the nuclear family’s networks of care and communing. Although bound up in loss, both works ‘Sanctus!’ (2024) and ‘Daddy’s Boy’ (2020) are Browne’s own forms of world building through film. Here they surface their own uncertainties about belonging to form vernacular studies of intimacy and personhood that run along both mythic and personal lines. This is a continuous practising of transformation and renewal, involving the intractable renegotiating of identification, and a hopeful unfolding of what it means to be vulnerably entangled in the world.}

_{Browne has exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Edinburgh Art Festival 2024 co-commissioned with the University of Edinburgh Art Collection, Bahia Independent Film Festival Brazil, Project Arts Centre with aemi and Cinenova, Freelands Foundation, Talbot Rice Gallery, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, LUX Scotland, David Dale Gallery at P/////AKT Amsterdam, the European Media Art Festival No. 34, TULCA Visual Art Festival, bff/Docs Ireland, and Rua das Gaivotas, Lisbon. They were awarded the Salzburger Kunstverein Sunset Kino Award 2021 for excellence in contemporary film. Browne’s work is represented in public collections of The Arts Council and the University of Edinburgh Art Collection.}

_{Residency Period: June – July 2025}

_{Leonhard Pill, born in Munich (Germany) in 1987, studied psychology, philosophy, Portuguese, and Russian at the University of Salzburg after completing his civil service, graduating with a master's degree in psychology in 2017. Leonhard has been making music since he was 18 years old, and has been active as a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker since 2014. For his latest film project about his sister who is a shephardess, Leonhard received the BMKÖS start-up grant and the annual film grant from Land Salzburg.}

_{Supported by Land Salzburg}

_{Residency Period: February 2025} 

_{2025 Winter Exhibition: Bloemenlust}

_{Karen Kraven is a Canadian artist working with photography, sculpture and installation. Influenced by her father’s (and his father’s) knitting factory, which stopped manufacturing the year that she was born, and by the physical and optical properties of textiles, her practice explores the ways in which clothing registers the body — how the body is unfinished, unstable and like an archive, something that unfolds and changes with time — pointing to the sustained impact of work and wear.} 

_{Recent solo exhibitions have included Le Chiffonier at AXENÉO7 in Gatineau (2022), Hoist at PLATFORM Centre in Winnipeg (2022), Lull at Latitude 53 in Edmonton (2020), Dust Against Dust at Parisian Laundry in Montreal (2019) and Pins & Needles in the Toronto Sculpture Garden (2018). Reviews of Kraven’s work have been published in C Magazine, Canadian Art, Momus and Artforum. Her work was also recently acquired by the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal.}

_{Residency Period: June – July 2024}

_{2024 Summer Exhibition: Rogue Planet}

_{Hedda Roman is a Düsseldorf-based artist mesh composed of Hedda Schattanik and Roman Szczesny. Interweaving cinematographic elements with surreal animation, literature, drama, sculpture, photography, and drawing, they create, among others, immersive video installations as well as computer-generated images. Solo exhibitions include Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2023, 2021), Salzburger Kunstverein, (2023), Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2021), Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2019), Julia Stoschek Collection, Studio 54, Düsseldorf (2019), Insel Hombroich, Neuss (2018), COMA Gallery, Sydney (2018)}

_{Their exhibition Rogue Planet at Oakville Galleries  explores the complexities of fictional biography, origin, and identity through AI technologies.}

_{Supported by Goethe Institut}