James Gardner
Using archives and image databases, James Gardner’s practice looks to medieval and premodern documents to consider the ways in which images can be linked with cognitive processes. Lately, he’s been interested in how monastic cultures or other “Western esoteric traditions” used certain mnemonic images and figures to help along cognitive tasks like oration, liturgical practice, or symbol building. Looking closer, it gets quite strange as these mnemonic systems get tied into subjects like astral magic, hermetic philosophy, and even contemporary neuroscience. Here, the function of image becomes one with agency and bears a heuristic use. In short: images help us build our subjectivities. Gardner paints in order to explore this apparent image-agency while investigating the image’s innate ability to manifest new forms of knowledge and experience. When interpreting and producing images in this way, the task becomes not only understanding what an image represents but also how it can be used.
Born in Kitchener Ontario, James Gardner currently lives in Montreal, and holds an MFA from Concordia University. His recent solo exhibitions include Ecstatic Distance at the Fonderie Darling (2024), Here to Go at the Glenhyrst Art Gallery (2024), and As Gardens Need Walls at Galerie Nicolas Robert Toronto (2021). Gardner’s work was also included in various group exhibitions such as Les plus beaux cauchemars/Cruel to Be Kind at the Galerie Stewart Hall (2023), and SOS: A Story of Survival, Part 1, The Image at tge Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery (2023). In the past few years, James Gardner was awarded the TFVA’s Artist Prize, the Tom Hopkins Memorial Graduate Award, the Joseph Armand Bombardier Canadian Master’s Scholarship (SSHRC), and was short listed for the 2020 Bronfman Fellowship, amongst multiple other awards. Furthermore, Gardner is the winner of the 2020 Nancy Petry Award and the William Blair Bruce European Travel Scholarship, which took him on a research trip to Greece, Italy, and Turkey to continue his research on Western esoteric imagery as it relates to the Art of Memory and Monastic image traditions. Gardner’s work has been supported by multiple grants from the the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grants.
Recent Exhibitions
Chapitre III -Group exhibition
From April 4 to May 25, 2024
Paradeisos - Group exhibition
From July 9 to September 3, 2022
As Gardens Need Walls
From October 14 to November 13, 2021
To Climb a Tall Pine
From March 17 to April 17, 2021
