David Gillanders
David Gillanders was born in Toronto, Canada in 1968 and studied at the University of Western Ontario, London and McGill University, Montreal. He is currently living and working in Ottawa, Canada.
Recipient of grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Ontario Arts Council, David Gillanders has exhibited his work widely in Canada and the United States. His work has been reviewed in the Montreal Gazette, Le Devoir, Vie des Arts, ArtFocus, Thingsofdesire.ca, Akimbo.biz, among others.
His work is held in a number of notable collections, among them the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the MNBAQ Art Bank, the City of Ottawa Fine Art Collection, the Art Gallery of Northumberland, National Bank , Loto-Québec, and BMO Financial Group .
Artist Statement
Years ago in a small Parisian gallery I bought an etching, a celestial map by the 17th century English astronomer John Flamsteed documenting the positions of the stars visible in the northern hemisphere, with the Milky Way cutting a blue swath through the otherwise mathematical image. On the back, in pencil, was written "Petite carte du ciel", Little Map of the Sky. It was a beautiful and audacious thing to attempt, to condense the endless night sky to a few marks on an eight by ten-inch piece of paper. My Carte du ciel and Map paintings, though inspired by Flamsteed, are maps of a different kind.
These paintings, careful arrangements of dots, lines and small organic shapes on fields of color, are abstractions that nonetheless invite flashes of recognition. The dots may be signifiers, but of what? Are they cosmic? Microscopic? Atomic? Bacteriological? Radiological? Within the vocabularies of painting, these works are true to the gap that exists between reality and our perception of it. They offer us something but don’t define it. These are maps without legends.