James Gardner  Syzygy

Gallery tour: Thursday November 29 at 5 pm
Vernissage: Thursday November 29 at 6 pm
Exhibition: November 30 to December 21, 2018

The McClure Gallery is pleased to present Syzygy, an exhibition by James Gardner. A syzygy is an alignment of three celestial bodies. In this exhibition, it is not planets but three bodies of work that conjunct and resonate with one another. Shown together for the first time, this conglomeration of painting and sculpture explores how images build, gather, and accumulate. Gardner wants the exhibition to help the viewer think about how images emerge and reify over time; how they fragment and recede, not just in memory or cognition, but also throughout history. As such, Sygyzy contextualizes images and image making as analogous with geologic process and other forms of biotic growth and decay. The work is arranged so as to mimic occurrences like accretions or sedimentations. Even as the assemblies of paintings and sculptures make reference to the studio, we see too how systems of making can point towards processes of propagation, replication, or degradation. A picture is never static, but remains caught up in a recombinant process.

The paintings in the exhibition collage together fragments of memory, image, and symbol. Their structures and references are culled from Gardner’s research into ‘Western esotericism’. Subjects like alchemical philosophy inform material processes, colour and form resonate with tropes from psychedelic culture, and the traces of imagery in the paintings allude to Gardner’s encounter with astrological symbolic systems. References are made to the places he inhabits too, but these are rendered strange through recurrent methods of dissolution and reconstitution. The sculptural work in the show has a direct correlation with the paintings, as all the material used is a by-product of the painting process. Either as embellished material cast-offs or caricatures of studio infrastructures, the sculptures anchor image making in a network of conceptual and material relations. The experience of looking becomes an encounter with an ecology of image.

Born, 1983, in Kitchener Ontario, James Gardner currently lives in Montreal and is a MFA candidate at Concordia University. This is his first solo exhibition in Montreal. Gardner has received multiple awards including The Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grants, the TFVA’s Artist Prize, and The Canada Council for the Arts Project Grant. Recently Gardner received the prestigious Joseph Armand Bombardier Canadian Master’s Scholarship. Gardner was nominated for the 2014 RBC Painting Competition and was also a founding member of the artist collective VSVSVS. Recent exhibitions include Not Together but Alongside at Mercer Union (Toronto, 2015), Painting Eaters at Katzman Contemporary (Toronto, 2016), Sailing Stones at Platform Projects, (Athens, 2017), and Selenotropic at Campus gallery (Barrie, 2017).

Read a review of this exhibition on Akimblog.