Saturday, October 24t across both gallery locations.
About this Event
Aideen Barry: Silent Songs
Gairloch Gardens & Centennial Square
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 24, 2026
2:00–5:00 PM
Exhibition Opening at Centennial Square
2:00–5:00 PM
Exhibition Opening Reception and Remarks in Gairloch Gardens
All are welcome
Admission is Free
Stay tuned for the Fall 2026 ARTbus updates!
This fall, Oakville Galleries is pleased to present Silent Songs, Aideen Barry's inaugural solo exhibition in Canada, featuring the world premiere of her enigmatic and ethereal film Embroidering the Earth's Mantle. The exhibition unfolds across both of our gallery sites, featuring recent films, a new body of intricately embroidered drawings, and a series of richly printed film stills.
One of Barry's defining concerns is the recovery of voices and histories that have been silenced. Through phantasmagoric narratives that weave together folklore, oral histories, ecology, and archival research, Barry reveals the persistence of cultural memory despite histories of erasure and repression. Her hallucinatory and fantastical works foreground languages and other forms of cultural knowledge that have been suppressed, building new cinematic worlds for these voices to resurface.
Barry’s films, The Song of the Bleeding Tree (2023) and the acclaimed ᖃᐅᔨᒪᔭᐅᔪᓐᓃᖅᑐᑦ / Seachmalltacht / Oblivion (2021) will be presented as a hypnotic video installation in our Centennial Square gallery. Created in collaboration with Inuit throat singer Riit ᕇᑦ and Irish harpist Aisling Lyons, Oblivion brings together two distinct musical traditions that were once suppressed under colonial rule, exploring the resilience of cultural memory through sound, performance, digital technology and moving image. In The Song of the Bleeding Tree, Barry turns to the intertwined histories of landscape, ecology, and mythology, reflecting on the enduring impact of colonial violence while imagining possibilities for repair and renewal.
Throughout our historic gallery spaces in Gairloch Gardens, Barry presents a mythical world through film, animation, and drawing inspired by the life and work of the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, whose distinctive dreamlike works combine science, alchemy, mysticism, medieval imagery, engineering, and the occult into grand, fantastical narratives. Barry pulls on Varo’s themes of displacement, transformation, and survival, interpreting them into meditations on creation, labour, fate, and women's agency envisioning a collective rise from a dark world of constraint through the weaving of reality into existence.
Event venue & nearby stays
Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, 1306 Lakeshore Road East, Oakville, Canada
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