Tim Gardner Exhibition

303 Gallery (555 W 21st St.)

This event has ended.

303 Gallery presents its seventh exhibition of new paintings by Tim Gardner.

Known for his masterful watercolors marking moments in time, Tim Gardner depicts scenes that collectively form a vivid portrait of contemporary life. Drawing primarily on an extensive personal image archive, he uses photography as a point of departure to elucidate the psychological realism of lived experiences.

In his latest works, Gardner continues his exploration of the inherently complex relationship between people and the environment —a dynamic that became more pronounced during the past year as our ability to travel and be outdoors became increasingly formalized, regulated and restricted. In Theater Seats, LA Landfill, Gardner captures the moment after a truck has offloaded a heap of bright red theater seats, a poetic nod to the pandemic’s impact on the performing arts community. Ferrari, Morning Light and In the Garden regard calm, familiar moments in the suburban landscape with rapt attention, ordinary scenes that, through Gardner’s careful consideration of color, light, and composition, are transformed into meditations on an everyday sublime.

Human influence over, and interference in, the natural world looms large even when figures are absent from the image, implicated instead through technological infrastructure. Skynet and Skynet Dawn observe a sky punctuated by communications satellites, visible to the eye as a uniform grid of dots. Their light seems to outshine the stars, an eerily poignant reflection on the encroachment of the digital world into the physical.

With Cali Poppy and Yellow Poppies, Gardner’s approach shifts, isolating flowers as the subject matter for portraits, articulating the minute details of each plant’s anatomy with an attentive reverence. Here Gardner most plainly evokes the irrepressibly human desire to pause and endeavor a meaningful connection with nature, in spite of all efforts to the contrary.

Tim Gardner was born in Iowa City in 1973 and grew up in Canada. He received a BFA from the University of Manitoba in 1996 and an MFA from Columbia University in 1999. Gardner has exhibited his work internationally at such institutions as The National Gallery, London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among others. He currently lives and works in British Columbia.