Accélération
November 19 - December 19, 2009
It is with great pleasure that Galerie Trois Points invites you to the opening of its first solo show of work by David Gillanders. From November 19th to December 19th, 2009, three new bodies of work will be shown in the gallery space.
Gillanders‘ painting disrupts the boundaries between the image and our perception of it. Delicate surfaces and a meticulous approach seduce first, and then an invitation to slow and varied readings takes the viewer deep into the work. This exhibition revolves mostly around two series of work depicting a process of exponential growth. The artist invites the viewer to a reflection on the numerous varieties of accelerating change occurring around us in contemporary society. Within ten paintings, and ten short doublings, we jump from two subtle spots of light, open-ended signifiers of change, to one thousand and twenty four. We could easily imagine the state of things if there were an eleventh or twelfth painting. Conceptually, there is nothing to stop us from projecting this series forward endlessly.
The second body of work, You Are Here, approaches the same idea in a slightly different way. Sixty-four one-quarter-size versions of the first eight larger Acceleration paintings occupy an entire gallery wall in a random arrangement. As the gaze shifts between images, backward and forward randomly between stages of accelerating change, the work suggests to the viewer that we, hardly passive spectators, are among the change around us, indeed, we are often its very engine.
Finally, a series of self-portraits takes over the gallery’s small room. Through material interruptions undermining the images’ otherwise neat precision, and a tracking of the sequential motion of the artist’s face as it shifts from left to right and finally begins to fall below the painting’s bottom edge, the paintings investigate themes of perception and the transient nature of things.
Born in Toronto, David Gillanders graduated from the University of Western Ontario, and from McGill University. Now living and working in Montreal, his work has been shown in numerous spaces, such as the Art Gallery of Northumberland in Cobourg, Ontario, the Maison de la Culture Plateau Mont-Royal, Galerie McClure and Maison de la Culture Marie-Uguay in Montreal, as well as in the Chicago Art Source Gallery. His work is included in private collections in Europe, the United Sates and Canada, as well as the Collection de Prêt d’oeuvres d’art of the MNBAQ and the Méridien Versailles Collection.