PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Have something else in mind? Are you looking to plan a fun end-of-year school field trip or trying to find a creative community partner to include in an upcoming school event? Contact Oakville Galleries’ education team and we will work with you to design and lead an art workshop that best suits your students’ needs and interests. Program content can also be designed to integrate curricula currently being delivered in your classroom, offering students a unique hands-on opportunity to learn in, through and about the arts.
For more information and to discuss program options, contact education@oakvillegalleries.com.
Sample Program: Testing Territories
This program is geared towards encouraging students to explore their relationship to their surroundings, from the school's interior, to the surrounding landscape and cityscape. To pursue this mission, students will use a number of techniques and methods common to contemporary artists and architects, including drawing, photography, cartography, construction of temporary structures, site research, and classification.
Week 1 – Surveillance and voyeurism: During this first session, students discuss how, why, and what we see and do not see. Considering those structures that affect sight, students explore strategies for taking photos through hedges, over fences, around corners, from above, and in other inaccessible areas.
Week 2 – Classification: Students consider how objects and spaces are classified, and reflect on the migration of things from one category of space (industrial/urban/natural) to another. Next, students delimit an area of the school grounds/interior, then gather and sort all objects, detritus, and natural specimens found therein according to criteria of their making.
Week 3 – Collage/Assemblage: Students create small sculptures and/or collages out of the materials found during the previous week's classification project.
Week 4 – Mapping: After a brief introduction to mapping strategies, students are invited to challenge their relationship with familiar spaces by creating sensory maps of the school organized around only one chosen element (e.g., smell, taste, sound, texture, or colour).
Week 5 – Utopias: Based on the mapping project, students identify one thing they would change about the space they surveyed and design a utopian alternative. Students then translate their ideas into three-dimensional form and consider the possibilities of transforming a space through art.
Week 6 – Intervention: Thinking about audience and interaction, as well as the links between art and activism, students execute a site-specific intervention in the school based on their utopian designs.