James Gardner
Statement
How do pictures affect us? How can a painting transform and shape us? Control and manipulate us? Or, how can a simple image allow us to encounter new forms of knowledge, or reach new edges of experience? From some of the earliest traces of human culture, images and image making has been an important key in understanding our subjective experiences. Images have become useful tools that help us structure our evolving consciousnesses while allowing us to manufacture the symbol systems necessary to carry our most important ideas forward through time and history. Using painting, along with sculpture and installation, my work explores these apparent forms of “image agency” and the myriad of mechanism that images use to imprint themselves so profoundly on our psyche.
Using image archives and image databases, historical imagery from Western esoteric iconographic traditions[1] are reconstructed into paintings. This allows me to consider a multitude of forms of “image agency” as found throughout history. This visual history of the Alchemical sciences, the mnemonic systems of the Ars Memoriae (Art of Memory), and the liturgical, astral, and magic(k)al practices of religious and occult schools are all examples of traditions in which images and pictures are understood to hold an acute form of agency. These image properties can be utilized to perform certain tasks, cognitive operations, or even the alteration of consciousness. These historical examples are deployed to make paintings in the studio and serve as practical ways to study their possible use and affects/effects. In this way, these image making traditions are used to better understand the role and function of the image in relation to contemporary modes of making, thinking, and seeing.
In exhibition contexts, paintings stand alongside installation elements that mimic aspects of the various traditions in which imagery is drawn from, such as architectural features, or the furniture of archives and images collections, or ritual spaces. So too, sculptures, geological material, and studio ephemera often populate exhibition spaces to help contextualize the paintings in relation to philosophical and theoretical ideas about the nature, function, and use of images.
In my work and research the function of the image becomes one with agency that carries a heuristic use. 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. In my own work, the act of painting itself becomes an act of process philosophy to understand how new or ancient images can enact agency. For me, making art is a contemplative exercise in thinking about images and the ways in which images work on us, work on our bodies, and work on our identities
[1] Western esotericism is a field of study that critiques the received history of the west by looking at neglected, rejected, and “secret” knowledge within western culture. An umbrella term, Western esotericism covers important aspects of my research such as the legacy of astrology in western visual culture, the influence of Alchemy in the early sciences, Eastern influence in early western philosophy, and the occult influences on the origins of Modern Abstraction, to name but a few. As Non-western and Indigenous traditions help us re-contextualize contemporary practice and art history from outside colonial structures, Western esotericism has been useful for me to re-examine western traditions from within. With the University of Amsterdam offering MA degrees in this specialized field, as well as research chairs at the Sorbonne and University of Exeter, this is relatively new and innovative academic discipline that increasingly informs my artistic practice.
Bio
Born in Kitchener Canada in 1983, I grew up in Brantford Ontario Canada and completed my undergrad at the University of Guelph in 2008. In 2017 I moved to Montreal to complete an MFA at Concordia University (2020). This came after an incredible 7 years in Toronto helping to run the much lauded artist run centre, residency program, and collective VSVSVS. A difficult transition, but my MFA was also incredible and yielded numerous grants and awards including SSHRC, the Tom Hopkins Gradate Memorial Award, the Petry Painting Prize, and William Blair Bruce Travel Scholarship. The latter resulted in a research trip to Greece and Turkey looking at Byzantine Icon Painting traditions, continuing my research into “image agency” and Western esotericism. This research lead to the acclaimed exhibition at Monteal’s pretigous Darling Foundry, with reviews in both La Devoire and Esse Magazine. This and recent exhibitions at Stewart Hall (Pointe-Claire, QC), FOFA Gallery (Montreal), Glenhyrst Gallery (Brantford, ON), KWAG (Kitchener, ON), and Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montreal/Toronto) were supported by multiple grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. This March, I will conclude my Byzantine Icon research with a solo exhibition at Galerie Nicolas Robert in Toronto. Currently I am teaching painting at Concordia University, working in my studio, and proposing a number of residency applications to begin a new body of work and research.