David Gillanders

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Obtain the list of available artworks

Canadien. Born in Toronto, Canada (1968).
Lives and works in Ottawa-Gatineau, Canada.

David Gillanders’s methodically constructed paintings and drawings have in recent years employed a strategy of divided surfaces and an imagery based in the banal elements of everyday life to create artworks as metaphors for time, memory, work, and domesticity.

An ink grid imposes itself like the strings over an archaeological site onto the drawn objects of daily life scattered through the paper layers beneath.  Paintings representing superabundant piles of domestic clutter are done in crisply divided sections of a size and shape that the artist could start and finish in a single sitting, just as a clay brick is made in a size and shape manageable by a human hand, not bigger than a hand can hold and not heavier than a hand can repeatedly lift and place. An image, a corner of a backyard garden overlapped by domestic detritus, is painted in oil on paper seven times in seven different ways, then cut into horizontal bands and re-combined into new, composite versions of the original image.  A garden, like an art practice, is a place of experimentation where trial and error produce success and failure. Gillanders’s artworks speak to the possibility of new kinds of order emerging from the reconstitution of fragmented parts.

David Gillanders studied at the University of Western Ontario in London and later at McGill University in Montreal, where he stayed for more than twenty years. Gillanders has exhibited his work in numerous exhibition centers and galleries including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal, Gallery McClure, Maison de la culture Marie-Uguay, and Galerie Port-Maurice, Montreal, as well as the John B. Aird Gallery, Toronto, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

 

COLLECTIONS

Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Québec, Canada)
Art Gallery of Northumberland (Cobourg, Canada)
Banque nationale du Canada (Montréal, Canada)
BMO Financial Group (Toronto, Canada)
Collection Loto-Québec (Montréal, Canada)
Ville d’Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada)
Le Méridien Versailles (Montréal, Canada)
Dick and Betsy DeVos Collection (Grand Rapids, MI, USA)

Curriculum vitae

Exhibitions

Ballast

David Gillanders
April 5 - May 17, 2014

Icebergs

David Gillanders
March 24 - April 21, 2012