Modal Home
Tristram Lansdowne

From September 8 to October 7, 2017

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Tristram Lansdowne first exhibition at the gallery, Modal Home. This new body of work is based on the history of Western perspectival space in relation to the modern home. Through a focus on highly constructed but contemplative spaces – fireplaces, pools, gardens, the work reconsiders the Modernist narrative of form and function in order to meditate on the relations between visual artifice, idealism, and notions of value and taste. Lansdowne is interested in how this domestic architecture has become a simulacrum, an increasingly placeless, digitally produced space of capital speculation. It lays bare the bourgeois conceits of high Modernism and at the same time functions as a retroactive mythological origin point for a Cartesian perspectival Sublime that borders on the science fictional. Lansdowne attempts to interrogate this virtual modernism through strategies of visual and spatial manipulation, approaching the contemporary modern home as an uncanny site that wavers between sanctuary and collapsible image.

Tristram Lansdowne (b. 1983) is based in Toronto. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design (2007). He has a multidisciplinary practice, which includes watercolour, sculpture, installation and print, and is focused on themes of progress and idealism in landscape and architecture. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across North America and in the UK.  His work is in public collections in Canada and the US, including the National Gallery of Canada.