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.
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.
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.
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:
True Currency
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.
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.
Come Together
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.
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!
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.
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.
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. Within our current market economy, competition and accumulation are prioritized above all else, but what is lost through these ways of relating? In a time of precarity, generalized anxiety, and ecological collapse, how do we sustain ourselves? How do we understand the discrepancies between those who profit from extraction and those who feel its effects?
In his classic book, The Gift, Lewis Hyde proposes that all artwork is necessarily a gift because the artist offers it freely to their audience. When gifts circulate, their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake, and a kind of decentralized cohesiveness emerges. 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.
Christina Battle is an artist based in amiskwacîwâskahikan, (also known as Edmonton, Alberta), within the Aspen Parkland: the transition zone where prairie and forest meet. Her practice focuses on thinking deeply about the concept of disaster: its complexity, and the intricacies that are entwined within it. Much of this work extends from her recent PhD dissertation (2020) which looked closer to community responses to disaster: the ways in which they take shape, and especially to how online models might help to frame and strengthen such response. She is currently the Online Editor for BlackFlash magazine, dedicated to presenting critical opinions, urgent issues and divergent artistic practices from across the prairies, Canada, and beyond. She collaborates with Serena Lee as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE and has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries as both artist and curator, most recently at: The MacKenzie Art Gallery (Regina), The Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba (Brandon), The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Colorado), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), The John & Maggie Mitchell Gallery (Edmonton), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver); Forum Expanded at the Berlinale (Berlin), Blackwood Gallery (Mississauga), Trinity Square Video (Toronto), and Untitled Art Society (Calgary).
Helen Chois a Pickering-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, video, performance, drawing, text and photography, and draws from translations of language, tradition and the sites and materials of everyday habits. Her artistic practice contemplates the ever-shifting emotional landscapes of migration, language, memory, and representation. It considers objects, sites, transactions, and mass-produced materiality of everyday life as contained within human desire and the attendant struggle for connection. Cho holds an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) and has exhibited internationally. Her artworks have been exhibited at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Kunstverein Wolfsberg, Wolfsberg; Kumho Museum, Seoul; National Musuem of Contemporary Arts, South Korea; SFU Galleries, Vancouver; Articule, Monteral; Galerie Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam; and Galerie Magnus Müller, Berlin, among others. She has participated in artists-in-residences at Ssamziespace, Seoul; the Banff Centre, Banff; and European Ceramic Work Centre, Oisterwijk, the Netherlands.
Alvin Luong (梁超洪) creates artworks based on stories of human migration, land, and dialogues from the diasporic working class communities that he lives and works with. These stories are combined with biography to produce artworks that reflect upon issues of historical development, political economy, and social reproduction; and how these issues intimately affect the lives of people. In 2021, the artist was Artist-In-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), screened work at The Polygon Gallery in a co-presentation with Centre A (Vancouver), and presented solo exhibitions at Modern Fuel Artist-Run-Centre (Kingston, CA) and The New Gallery (Calgary); and produced and co-wrote a book published by The New Gallery Press (Calgary).
Sofia Mesa(b. 1995 Bogota, Colombia) is a multidisciplinary artist working with the cyanotype process, photography, drawing, sculpture and furniture design. Her cyanotype work began as a way to tangibly document/photograph/imprint bodies due to the weight of the body being an integral facet to the creation of the image. She is interested in proof of life, conserving it, and material exploration. She often works with various collaborators, the sun and the water being two principal ones, non-artists and community members. She has exhibited in various museums, galleries and artist run spaces in Toronto and New York City such as The Art Gallery of Ontario; Gallery TPW; Galley 44; The KUBE (NYC) and was commissioned by Contact Photography Festival in 2017 to create a public installation “Guardians” at Allan Gardens: a collection of artworks that displayed the necessity and reality of community. Sofia lives and works between New York City and Medellin.
Dana Prieto(born in 1984, Argentina; lives in Toronto, Canada) is an artist and educator with a site-responsive art practice that manifests in installation, performance, writing and diverse collaborations. Her work examines our intimate and collective entanglements with colonial institutions and power structures, calling for careful attention to ways of relating, thinking, making and consuming in the Anthropocene. Dana holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto, and her work has been presented in national and international galleries, public spaces and informal cultural venues.
Cassie Thornton an artist and activist who makes a “safe space” for the unknown, for disobedience, and for unanticipated collectivity. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. Cassie has invented a grassroots alternative credit reporting service for the survivors of gentrification, has hypnotized hedge fund managers, has finger-painted with the grime found inside banks, has donated cursed paintings to profiteering bankers, and has taught feminist economics to yogis (and vice versa). Her new book, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future, is available from Pluto Press. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.
Installation of True Currency at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2022. Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid.
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 Oshawa residents gathered in the past and celebrates the importance of community coming together in celebration or common interest.
Events and gatherings mark important community moments and offer a reprieve from everyday life. The photographs in this exhibition feature many of these moments including friends playing a round of billiards, crowds enjoying a day at the beach, and the community coming out to support troops being deployed or returning home. Other events depict groups gathering for a shared interest, whether marching for labour rights or rallying together through difficult times.
After a long two years with few in-person events, the photographs in this exhibition depict the sense of community gained when people come together and the virtues of creating genuine connections with those around us.
