Lot U

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 has 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, Gardner currently resides in Montreal, having graduated from the MFA program at Concordia University. Recent exhibitions include Syzygy at McClure Gallery (Montreal 2018), Vessels and Broods at Concordia’s MFA Gallery (Montreal 2020), and Lucky Dip at La Maison de la culture Notre-Dame-de-Grâce as part of Pictura (Montreal 2020). Gardner was awarded the TFVA’s Artist Prize, Tom Hopkins Memorial Graduate Award, Joseph Armand Bombardier Canadian Master’s Scholarship (SSHRC), and was short listed for the 2020 Bronfman Fellowship, among 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.