James Gardner
To Climb a Tall Pine
March 17 to April 17, 2021
Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present the exhibition To Climb a Tall Pine by Montreal painter James Gardner. For his first exhibition with the gallery, Gardner presents a new series of paintings reflective of his ongoing research into image-decay, the agency of images, and “Western esotericism”. Working with an amassed collection of iconographies from archives and image databases, Gardner redeploys historical imagery to make new paintings that seem caught between resurgence and disintegrating. These paintings become analogies for how images seem to fall away and re-emerge throughout historical time. Painting, and the space of the studio, remain for Gardner a privileged site in which to contemplate the ontological structure of images and the ways in which images can impact subjectivities.
Born in Kitchener Ontario, James Gardner currently lives in Montreal, having just graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University. His recent solo exhibitions include Syzygy at McClure Gallery (Montreal 2018), Vessels and Broods at Concordia’s MFA Gallery (Montreal 2020), and Gardner’s work was also included in the group show Lucky Dip at the La Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce as part of Pictura (Montreal 2020). In the past few years, James Gardner was awarded the TFVA’s Artist Prize, the Tom Hopkins Memorial Graduate Award, the prestigious 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 will take 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.
