In my latest Interspace paintings, I’m incorporating drawings of my personal iconography into abstract compositions. I am also working with low-relief setups created with cut and folded papers. These are color studies about light and shadow, ephemeral studies of the shapes of shadows and the negative spaces between cut-out shapes and their background. Gradients from the internal shading of objects, or the shadows cast by objects, are cut up and employed in building abstract compositions. These are are focused on the compression of space and light and chromatic variations.
The central focus in my Artifact Color Collages, begun in 2018, is the concept of phenomenal transparency; I employ opaque mixtures to achieve the illusion of transparency in the medium of oil paint. These are inspired by Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square series and are collages created with painted woodblock papers.
Interlusion, begun in 2019, combines the Artifact Color Collages with a return to trompe l’oeil paint handling in the interest of capturing subtle gradations of veils of color as they arc and flow over the compositions of the Artifact Color Collages with some transparency. Interlusion blends two or more sensibilities of spatial and atmospheric relationships in two dimensions to capture the transparency effects and the multiple layers of colors and their interactions.
Reviews
‘Where reductive formalism (“Greenberg”) would see an unresolved contradiction I see a synergistic interplay that gives both kinds of transparency more meaning and value than either would have in isolation. It’s an expansive interplay, which gives these works a large scale and landscape atmosphere.’
-Carter Ratcliff
‘Gardiner’s earliest uncollages fuse conceptually complex topics, but visually champion minimalist aesthetic, despite the amalgam of genera present in single work – abstraction, surrealism, pop art, photomontage, dechirage, trompe l’oiel. What holds together her elegant partnerships between form and content is an exquisite sense of light and color.’
-Todd Bartel – excerpt from ‘Before It’s an Uncollage’ – Kolaj Magazine
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