An Interview with James Gardner
Artist James Gardner is on a quest to unlock the hidden potential of images. By delving into medieval and premodern texts, he explores how ancient traditions like alchemy and astrology used visual symbols to enhance cognitive processes. Gardner’s work challenges us to reconsider the role of images, not just as representations of reality, but as tools for shaping our thoughts and experiences. His paintings, often composed of fragmented and reassembled imagery, invite viewers to engage with the power of the visual and the mysteries of the human mind.
Can you tell us a little bit about you?
My name is James Gardner and I am a visual artist living in Montreal, Canada. I moved here from Toronto in 2017 to pursue an MFA at Concordia University. I kind of fell in love with this city (and my huge cheap studio!) and decided to stick around. Most of my days are spent making art, but I've also been teaching painting a bit at Concordia and learning to do some woodworking at the painting stretcher shop Faux-Cadre Canal. The Montreal art scene is vibrant and I have found a great community of DIY spaces, artist-run centers, and galleries here. I am fortunate as well to be working with Galerie Nicolas Robert, who has been representing my work in Canada since 2021. For a painter like myself, its kind of a ideal set up. Montreal may be the last city in North America where the dream still feels alive. As for my art practice, my work has been centred around making paintings and installations that work with ideas of "image agency" and "magical" images as found in medieval, Byzantine, and Renaissance history. After winning a few awards for my work (The Petry Prize and the W.B Bruce Travel Scholarship), I was recently able to travel to Mount Athos and other monasteries in Greece and Turkey collecting imagery and stories about "miraculous" Icon paintings (my favourite is the Icon of the Mother of God that sunk a pirate ship!). I had a big solo show at Montreal's Darling Foundry earlier this spring that worked with this research material, and I'm still captivated by the ways that these historical forms of image-magic can applied to contemporary painting practices. These ideas are still keeping me busy in the studio.
Can you explain how your understanding of "Western esoteric traditions" has evolved over time and how to do aim to apply these concepts to your work?
I am a pretty skeptical person, but I had a very strange encounter in 2010 that got me interested in the ideas associated with the Western esoteric tradition. I began reading about subjects like alchemy, Hermeticism, and Occultism and it was something I immediately wanted to bring into my studio work. However, given the growing prevalence of a lot of these “esoteric” ideas within cultural phenomena like New Age spirituality, conspiracy theory, and the often cringe worthy imports of pop culture astrology, I found it difficult to connect these ideas to my art practice in critical and meaningful ways. It was not until graduate school and my discovery of the Warburg Institute and the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) that I was able to find the right approaches to tackle these admittedly slippery ideas and integrate them into my studio practice. An emergent academic discipline, "Western esotericism" not only studies the fields of the Western esoteric tradition, but also looks to rejected or hidden knowledge that runs alongside dominant culture. Some strands of this research are getting to be pretty well known, like the connection between early 20th century abstraction to mediumship and mysticism (Think Hilma Af Klint). It gets even more interesting as we look back through history to consider the connection between image making and planetary magic in the Florentine Renaissance, or the influence of Pythagoreanism on Ancient Greek Philosophy. There is a burgeoning program at the University of Amsterdam’s Centre for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (HHP) that has really elevated the scholarship dealing with these subjects, and for me, Western esotericism has become a useful lens in which to consider the history of art as well as contemporary artistic production. Through this community of researchers, I've been lucky to find ample resources and texts that have been instrumental in connecting western esoteric traditions to the work I do as an artist. Important scholarly work is now being done on subjects like the history of alchemy, astrology, and magic(k) and this field offers some great critical methodologies and interpretive keys to approach the normally treacherous field of study. As such, my recent work has heavily relied on this scholarship while looking at the mechanisms of image-magic from antiquity to the Renaissance and the ways these procedures might be applied to contemporary painting practice. My recent field research at the monasteries of Greece and Turkey is the most recent iteration of this research trajectory, and is heavily indebted to scholars working under the moniker of Western esotericism.
How do you select the images from your archive for your paintings? Are there any specific criteria or themes that guide your choices?
I am constantly collecting images that I think would make good paintings. It’s strange that some of these images get saved on hard drives and are never looked at again, while others I cannot stop looking at. This is currently the case of an Icon I found while at the Holy Monastery of Saint Dionysiou. It is a painting of two of the monastery's founding monks, holding the monastery in their hands. I have made 7 paintings based on this image and I just started another. Its amazing how this image, no matter how many times I've looked at it or painted it, it continues to resonate and its symbols and allegories continue to present new understandings and experiences in the studio. So really its an obsession with a particular image that guides my choices. My image selection process feels almost like an acute case of Iconomania. It is worth mentioning here that image experiences like this are what got me interested in Western esotericism in the first place. Working closely with images and pictures I have had some very peculiar image experiences. I have come to really appreciate the notion, set forth by thinkers like Aby Warburg, that artists become vectors for certain images. It is as though certain images want or need to be rediscovered, reimagined and recapitulated into the culture. Late a night in the studio, I often wonder if it is me who chose to paint this picture or did the image choose me?
How do you balance the historical and contemporary aspects of your work? Do you see your practice as a continuation of medieval and premodern traditions, or as a radical departure?
I really just want to understand what it means to make a painting and how a painting functions. Looking to medieval and premodern traditions has been incredibly useful in understanding how past cultures understood images and how they were used. Especially in medieval contexts, images were much more scarce, so its easier to get a sense of how an image functions in the culture and how images were used within the psychology of the maker. However, I am not interested in necessarily preserving these traditions, but rather applying select methods and procedures from my research to make paintings that address our cultural moment and our current inundation with images. So on one hand my work promotes certain methodologies from older traditions, but it is applied in such a way as too be completely transformed in both form and content. I have been surprised again and again at historical understandings of images and the value these ideas have when considering our contemporary visual culture; how images can be used to manipulate and control; or how images can be used as cognitive tools. We are so awash in pictures I think we often forget how powerful they can be, but this was something that medieval and premodern minds understood well.
What are some of the challenges and rewards you face when working with found images?
Even the most simple or mundane images can contain multitudes of meaning and surprising legacies. The challenge is to not be completely overwhelmed by the voracity of images and the vertiginous associations they contain. The reward is same; careful looking and introspection about any image always leads to seemingly endless new realms of thought and experience.
When did you first know you wanted to be an artist? Were there any early experiences that particularly inspired you?
I was always drawing as a child, it was just something I took too as soon as I could hold a pencil. It helped too that my Grandfather Morris Gardner was a painter and he always kept a small studio in the basement of my grandparent’s home. I loved that room and the smell of paint and linseed oil mixed with tobacco (he was a heavy smoker). That smell still makes me nostalgic. That was certainly an early experience that taught me you could just make stuff. However, my hometown of Brantford Ontario is pretty blue collar, so I saw being an artist as just something you did alongside your real job in your free time. By the time I was ready to go off to University, I figured I would become a high school art teacher or something, as my teachers were really the only artists I knew. I was tremendously lucky to end up at the University of Guelph in the early 2000s. I met some really inspiring teachers and mentors at that time that introduced me to the art scene in Toronto, and it was the first time I met people who made a living making art. I pretty quickly dropped the idea of teachers collage and devoted my time to studying visual art and art history. I have had a dedicated studio practice ever since.
Are there any specific artists whose work has significantly influenced your own?
Very early on in my career the work of Canadian artists like Harold Klunder, Patterson Ewen and John Brown really impacted me and taught me what a painting could be, I think you can still see their influence in my work. Anslem Keifer is someone who's work I still return to often, as is the work of the British painters like Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. But as I've mentioned, I've been under the spell of more historical artist like Giotto, El Greco, and the history Byzantine painting lately. However, this is still tempered through a close engagement with contemporary art and scholarship and less about aping a certain style. Literary influences are also pretty informative to my practice. Right now I've been getting pretty deep in William S. Burroughs again, especially in regards to the "cut up method" and his and Brion Gysin's connection with Genesis P-Orridge and the "occultural" and magic(k)al work of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Its really interesting stuff. Ultimately though, I stand by that quote by Philip Guston (another big early influence and former Montrealer!): ‘When you start working, everybody is in your studio... But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave."
Outside of creating, what are some of the things that you are most passionate about?
Its hard to make distinctions in my life from the creative aspects, as everything seems to seep back into the studio, but music has always played a big part of my life. Strictly a listener, I had a great summer going to some really great music festivals like Electric Eclectics and Mutek. There is something integral for me about the spectacle of concerts and music festivals, and the energy they can bring back to the studio. Its been a great year for music too. The new Nick Cave and Bad Seeds album has been on repeat, and I think that new Jamie XX album is pretty good too… Other then music, a nice bike ride or camping trip is something I try to incorporate into my routine, but nothing really ever compares to being in the studio and making paintings.
What is your favourite book or film and why?
In my very first dingy studio in the basement of a thrift store, I stumbled, completely by chance, upon a beat up copy of the book “Art of Memory” by Frances Yates. This book completely altered my understanding of how images were used in ancient cultures, and remains an important touchstone in my research. I originally thought it was a simple book on memory, so I was surprised at the broaching of subjects like magic and alchemy. In short, Yates overviews how mnemonic systems were systematically used in an age before the printing press and outlines how specific images could be used to build imaginary architectures to house vast amount of data. She argues that this image-based mnemonic system heavily undergirds western visual culture and demonstrates how strands of the “Art of Memory” were syncretized with magic in the Renaissance with figures like Giordano Bruno. In fact, Francis Yates was a scholar at the Warburg Institute and, along with other scholars like Antoine Faivre, she was one of the earliest thinkers to bring Western esotericism to academia. So in some ways this book was also my first introduction to the idea of Western Esotericism. It is so rare that a book is able shift my worldview and so fundamentally alter the way that I think about the history of art, and for this it will always be a favourite.
Are there any specific projects or collaborations you're working on or planning for the future?
I'm still reeling a bit from my spring show at the Darling Foundry that came down in May 2024. After a very busy few years, it has been so very nice to return to the studio without any immanent deadlines and regain a bit of a more experimental and playful attitude. After a much needed lazy summer, some ideas are coming together though, and I am in the early stages of planning a trip to India to look at image use in meditation practices as well as the iconography of Vedic astrology. I’ll also have some work up with Nicolas Robert for the international art fair Art Toronto at the end of October, and we are planning another solo show at Nicolas Robert’s Toronto gallery in early 2025. With any luck next year will be as exciting as the last.
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