This month, we are taking inspiration from Kazuo Nakamura: Universal Pattern exhibition. As a member of the Painters 11, Nakamura was fascinated by nature. We are too! We will create bold and colourful textured abstract artworks finished with a decorative pattern frame.
Free admission.
This is a drop in event. No registration is required.
This event is generously sponsored by Ontario Power Generation.
The RMG encourages families to take some time and enjoy the art making process through creativity and collaboration.
Who has the best adventure journeys? Animals!
This month, we will be inspired by our permanent collection exhibition Journeys to create two artworks featuring beloved Canadian wildlife. In the studio, we will create silhouetted animal paintings while in the gallery exhibition we will texturize critters using watercolour pencil crayons.
Free admission.
This is a drop in event. No registration is required.
This event is generously sponsored by Ontario Power Generation.
The fourth and final outdoor RMG Fridays in 2022 features warm weather and warm vibes, so bring a lawn chair or a blanket and come experience the soulful musings of instrumental/fusion artist Desarae Dee.
This is an all-ages event, but pets will not be admitted. Please note that there is no smoking on city property, which includes the RMG’s backyard.
Program:
7:00 – Doors open
7:30 – Performance by Desarae Dee
8:00 – Tour of “Journeys”
8:30 – Performance by Desarae Dee
Upstairs in Arthurs on the 4th:
Films from DRIFF will be playing throughout the evening at 7:15pm, 8pm, and 9pm.
About the Films
The Night Shift | dir. Karim Shaaban | 14 mins
Zein, a young man in his mid-20s, seems content with his job as a customer service representative. During one of his late-night shifts, he receives a call from a customer which exposes him to the drudgery of his work, his powerlessness, and the ugliness of his life.
Deux Dollars | dir. Emmanuel Tenenbaum | 10 mins
After a week of leave, Sylvie is back at the Quebec company where she has been an exemplary employee for more than 15 years. She is then requested to attend a bizarre meeting.
A resident of Durham for the past thirty years, Desarae Dee is a powerhouse pianist/keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist who has been dubbed “Toronto’s Queen of Vibes”. With an extensive resume of singles as well as major releases, Desarae has developed a passionate and meaningful sound combining a unique mixture of faith, soul, and vulnerability in a divine balance. She continues to blaze a trail in the name of instrumental music all the while breaking barriers for current and future Black Women Musicians in Canada.
Special thanks to DRIFF in a Jiff and Canada Council and the Arts Reopening Fund for their support with this event. We acknowledge the financial support of Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
Exhibition Opening and Awards Reception: Wednesday, August 17, 2:30 pm (no registration required)
The Seniors Art Competition and Exhibition is a showcase of creativity and technical skill among members of the Oshawa Senior Community Centres, Oshawa Public Libraries, and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery. Featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, and more, this annual community exhibition is structured around a competition theme. This year, the theme is victory and we are excited to stage a triumphant return of the program after a two-year hiatus.
The theme of victory offers a lot for the imagination. From heroic individuals to hard won battles, personal growth to collective efforts, the concept of victory can be illustrated in so many ways. It suggests mastery and persistence, as well as stakes for winners and losers. Sometimes victory is won through struggle and met with relief. Sometimes it results in loss, and still others, in celebration. This exhibition offers a wide array of artistic visions of victory and its many interpretations.
Want to participate?
If you are 55+ and a member of the RMG, Oshawa Senior Community Centres, or the Oshawa Public Libraries, we invite you to submit one artwork for the exhibition.
Artwork drop off and registration takes place on Thursday, August 4 from 10 am-4 pm. Please print and fill out this form and bring your artwork to the RMG ready to hang to enter the competition and exhibition. Show us what victory means to you!
Prizes are awarded in three categories: Novice, Hobby, and Open.
Download the program brochure for more information, including eligibility and contest categories, or visit https://oshawalibrary.ca/seniors-art-competition/.
The Seniors Art Competition and Exhibition is co-hosted by The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa Senior Community Centres, and the Oshawa Public Libraries.
The third outdoor-edition of RMG Fridays happens on July 8th and features performances by two alt-rock bands with Durham Region roots: headliner Chastity, led by Whitby-born songwriter and frontman Brandon Williams, and Mary & Adelaide, a quartet of Oshawa-based indie-rockers. Don’t miss the loudest RMG Fridays concert yet!
Be sure to bring a lawn chair or blanket to enjoy the outdoor entertainment!
This is an all-ages event, but pets will not be admitted. Please note that there is no smoking on city property, which includes the RMG’s backyard.
Program:
7:00 – Doors open
7:30 – Performance by Mary & Adelaide
8:15 – Tour of “True Currency”
8:45 – Performance by Chastity
Upstairs in Arthurs on the 4th:
Films from DRIFF will be playing throughout the evening at 7:15pm, 8pm, and 9pm.
Brandon Williams makes resonant songs that capture isolation and resilience. As the songwriter behind Chastity, the Whitby, Ontario musician has made three unrelentingly perceptive albums culminating in the cathartic “Suffer Summer”, which was released in January 2022. Chastity started as a way for Williams to find community in his suffocating and isolating suburban life, and his songs serve as an outstretched hand for the like-minded people on the fringes.
Mary & Adelaide formed around an intersection in Oshawa. Unimpressed by the sounds they heard around them, four friends decided to make the music they wanted to hear. The indie rock outfit formed in 2017 in comprised of Aidan McGuirk on guitar and vocals, Luke Mitchell on drums, Sam Szigeti on bass, and Kyle Topolnisky on rhythm. They have released four singles, plus a video for their song ‘Faded’.
Special thanks to DRIFF in a Jiff and Canada Council and the Arts Reopening Fund for their support with this event. We acknowledge the financial support of Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
Join Malik for an Artist Talk on July 21st!
In virtual spaces, expressions of identity are usually performed through avatars. Malik McKoy’s new body of work asks how these carefully mediated and constructed identities actually relate to the people they represent when they are used to connect or perform moral virtue. As an abstract self-portrait, Code Switch also considers how technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence reproduce human biases, and more specifically, how racialized bodies are subject to the harms caused by online escapism and the commodification of identity.
The exhibition features five new paintings and an augmented reality installation created during McKoy’s residency in the RBC Artist Incubator Lab. A central character appears in all six works. His shifting form and surroundings are composed of the disassembled pieces of a 3D human figure; as 2D shapes, they are unrecognizable as the basic figure McKoy built using 3D modelling software. The avatar stands in for the artist, travelling through abstract and fantastical spaces, which relate in some way to McKoy’s own online identity and the collective experience of disorientation that virtual spaces can produce.
The internet offers users the freedom to grow beyond their physical environment and try on new identities – it is also prone to prejudice, exploitation, and misinformation, when truth or identity can appear transparent one moment and opaque the next. McKoy is interested in exploring how Black and queer bodies in particular are fetishized and consumed as cultural currency. For instance, in DBLRM (Do Black Lives Really Matter), he adopts a cynical view of public promises for representation, inclusivity, and justice by highlighting the fragile balance between utopia and horror in virtual fantasies. As playful as it is discerning, Code Switch reflects McKoy’s ongoing effort to bridge his digital and paint-based practices and to grapple with the increasingly blurred line between online and offline selves.
The RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program is generously sponsored by the RBC Foundation and the RBC Emerging Artist Project.
Join Malik in Gallery A for an artist-led tour of his solo exhibition Code Switch.
As RBC Emerging Artist in Residence, Malik McKoy has created a new body of work that considers how technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence reproduce human biases, and more specifically, how racialized bodies are subject to the harms caused by escapism and the commodification of identity online. In McKoy’s ongoing effort to bridge digital and paint-based practices, the work in this exhibition grapples with the increasingly blurred line between online and offline selves and how carefully constructed avatars actually relate to the people they represent.
The RBC Emerging Artist Residency Program is generously sponsored by the RBC Foundation and the RBC Emerging Artist Project.
Celebrate the opening of three exciting new exhibitions at the RMG! This summer, we are pleased to present:
Artists: Christina Battle, Helen Cho, Alvin Luong, Sofia Mesa, Dana Prieto, Cassie Thornton
June 18 – November 5, 2022
True Currency is an exhibition about indebtedness and exchange. Bringing together works that explore alternative economies, reciprocity, indebtedness, labour, and wellbeing, this show looks at how value is produced through the circulation of goods and ideas. Taking up exchange as both subject matter and form, the artworks here have been produced through various forms of collaboration. In looking at informal seed exchanges, mutual aid networks, gig economies, and solidarity groups, the works offer strategies for cooperation and resilience, seeing reciprocity as a marker or survival, capacity and flourishing.
Mystery Tomato Plant Seedlings – yours to take home!
As an extension of the project seeds are meant to disperse (2015-ongoing), artist Christina Battle has grown a number of mystery tomato plant seedlings to give away at the opening of the True Currency exhibition. In tending to the tomato plants, Christina asks participants to try and guess the variety of each plant and to save a seed and send it back to her as a way for the project to continue.
Share your tomato plant photos with the hashtag, #seedsaremeanttodisperse.
Artist: Malik McKoy
June 17 – July 31, 2022
As RBC Emerging Artist in Residence, Malik McKoy has created a new body of work that considers how technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence reproduce human biases, and more specifically, how marginalized bodies are subject to the harms caused by escapism and the commodification of identity online. In McKoy’s ongoing effort to bridge digital and paint-based practices, the work in this exhibition grapples with the increasingly blurred line between online and offline selves and how carefully constructed avatars actually relate to the people they represent.
Photographs from the Thomas Bouckley Collection
June 18, 2022 – January 8, 2023
Over the last couple of years, Oshawa’s popular community events, such as live music performances, Fiesta Festival, Pride, and the Peony Festival, shifted to digital formats. With plans for a return to in-person events, this exhibition reflects on ways historical Oshawa gathered in the past, and celebrates the importance of community coming together in celebration.
Tim Whiten
April 9th, 2022 – August 28th, 2022
Abstract artworks from our permanent collection
December 11th, 2021 – October 9th, 2022
Light refreshments will be served.
Coming from Toronto? We have organized a bus to bring you to and from the opening! Pick up will be in front of OCADU at 100 McCaul St at 1:00PM and will return to OCADU for 4:30. Reserve your spot today!
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is an accessible venue. To learn more or request accommodations, please visit https://rmg.on.ca/visit/accessibility-and-accommodations/.
Celebrate Emerging Visions with the staff and students of Durham College! This closing reception will be hosted during RMG Friday, the RMG’s monthly concert series.
Join us for the June edition of our monthly free concert series, RMG FRIDAYS! This night features short films courtesy of Durham Region International Film Festival, performances by NERiMA and Division Street, as well as the closing reception of the Durham College Thesis Exhibition: Emerging Visions.
Be sure to bring a lawn chair or blanket to enjoy the outdoor entertainment!
This is an all-ages event, but pets will not be admitted. Please note that there is no smoking on city property, which includes the RMG’s backyard.
Program:
7:00 – Doors Open
In the Backyard:
7:30 Performance by NERiMA
8:15 Closing reception of Durham College Thesis Exhibition: Emerging Visions
8:45 Performance by Division Street
In Arthurs on the 4th:
Films from DRIFF will be playing throughout the evening at 7:15pm, 8pm, and 9pm.
NERiMA
Staying true to both punk-rock roots and a love for the modern alternative scene, young, Oshawa-based NERiMA explores a mix of genres in their sentimental music. This up-and-coming band showcases a variety of sounds ranging from upbeat instrumentation with fun vocals to mellow songs with softly-sung, earnest lyrics.
Division Street
Kyle Hammer, known professionally as Division Street, is a musician, record producer, composer and songwriter from Bowmanville, Ontario.
Division Street is an ambiguous interpretation of a fork in one’s road.
Special thanks to DRIFF in a Jiff and Canada Council and the Arts Reopening Fund for their support with this event. We acknowledge the financial support of Canada’s private radio broadcasters.
