With Oakville Galleries' recent and continuing exploration of the relations between sound and image in the visual arts, we now celebrate the work of Daniel Olson. Sound is pivotal to Olson's conceptually based practice. Through diverse methods and mediums, he uses sound to mark an event, or at the very least, point to its potential.
Using found objects, often toys and music boxes, Olson alters them slightly or strips them down to their essentials. He subverts viewers' expectations of these familiar objects by tampering with their sound—playing a child's lullaby so slowly that the sound warps or dropping the keys of a xylophone one by one rather than hitting them with a mallet. In this manner, Olson isolates particular sounds or aspects of a toy's make up that easily get lost in the whole of a melody or an object we frequently encounter.
For Philosophical Moments, many of Olson's eclectic and playful objects are offered to the viewer to turn, twist and peer into, while others are displayed in such a way that they simply suggest the potential for interaction. In White Trash, Olson manipulates several of his 'noisemakers,' partially to reveal the implied nature of the object, but also to show the specific way in which he engages with his sculptures.
Philosophical Moments will premiere a performance-based video projection, Love and Reverie, where Olson recreates L'enfant au pain by Ozias Leduc, a seminal painting in Canadian art history. Olson thwarts our experience of this painting by turning Leduc's seemingly calm and quiet event into a tuneless cacophony.
Curated by Marnie Fleming
