07/28/2022
Everything I make I call a painting, and the genesis of this.
Sections
Michael Gardner’s practice is a sustained interrogation of the interval that separates imagination from its materialization. Working across painting, drawing, performance, sound, and found material, Gardner investigates the fragile, charged space he names A Violent Silence—the near-invisible distance just prior creation: he performs this as the moment between the conductor's baton held aloft and the downbeat calling forth the mass of sound from a multitude of musicians. Trained in critical theory and political aesthetics, Gardner’s work synthesizes rigorous conceptual frameworks with an idiosyncratic, associative poetics that makes biography and art history sites for formal and ethical inquiry.
This survey maps a career organized around recurrent motifs—ruin and devotion, invocation and erasure, voice and hush—and a practice that consciously blurs media boundaries so that paintings function as performances, performances as reliquaries, and texts as sculptural traces.
Gardner’s artistic method is both archaeological and performative. He mines historical and autobiographical material—New York’s downtown art scene, queer subcultures, religious iconography, and pop mythologies—reconstituting them within surfaces and durations that demand close, ethical attention. Influenced by critical theorist Thierry De Duve's Infra Thin which follows Duchamp's distance-between thought and production, and Aristotle’s notion of the form already-existing within matter, Gardner treats making as revelation: forms are not invented so much as coaxed out, the artist’s gesture “releasing” what is already latent in materials, memory, and cultural debris.
His MA (Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics, CalArts) grounds the work in theoretical rigor; his practice, however, remains emphatically embodied: paint skins, rabbit-skin glue, oil sticks, found cardboard, archival detritus, and performance scores are all modalities of the same inquiry. Gardner’s Post-Studio sensibility recycles waste and readymade surfaces as substrate, continuing a lineage of artists who see the world as raw material for transfiguration.
A pivotal node in Gardner’s oeuvre, Hauntology of the Infra Thin synthesizes painting, sculpture, and performance into a staged meditation on absence and return. The project’s sewn sunflowers and melted wax crows, assemblages, and canvases—often built from repurposed materials—function as both props for live ritual and as autonomous objects that hold traces of performance. The series literalizes the work’s title: ghosts of image and idea haunt the surfaces; the works become repositories for memory, enactments of the way an imagined form lingers inside a maker before it is made.
Notably, the Ann of Amerika paintings and related portrait work appear in this body: saturated, tactile surfaces that treat portraiture as palimpsest—American iconography and personal friendship superimposed, erased, and rewritten.
Here Gardner interrogates everyday surfaces and objects—still lives that read like found photographs or sentences. By exaggerating the indexical nature of objects (a McDonald's Happy Meal, a novel, a pair of sneakers) and rendering them as painted simulacra, these works test the border between representation and fetish, between what an object signifies and what it actually is in the studio’s material economy. These most closely perform Gardner's idea that, "everything I make I call a painting."
In Gold, Gardner returns to color theory and the metaphysics of light. The paintings in this portfolio treat gold not as commodity but as a chromatic-shamanic field, calling forth the space between this world and what the shaman psychically images through for revelation; a single stroke of an enormous palette blade slices an image not unlike a lab slide forecasting and revealing what is not seen by the naked eye, alongside luminous surfaces and ladder-like structures recalling the vvitch, the seer, the prophet (e.g., Jacob’s Ladder series), and functioning as metaphors for ascent, ritual, and dimensionality. This work stages the material of cultural desire, as gold repurposes all other light within the color field: simultaneously sacred and profane, signifying both wealth and the residue of spiritual aspiration.
Text operates as image and index across these interrelated series. Gardner’s painted and photographed/scanned words of multiple sources interrupt pictorial space as much as they index systems of belief and communication. What is imprinted upon the being. Working in a tradition that spans conceptual painting and text-based practice, these works use language as both sign and surface: the painted word becomes a record of mediation, a hesitancy between reading and seeing. The pieces function as a commentary on how language constructs and distorts identity, history, and authority.
This series formally explores proximity and distance—between bodies, memories, and moments in time. Built from pared down geometric gestures and layered atmospheres, The Space Between directs attention to intervals: the pause between notes, the micro-gap where meaning consolidates. Visually spare yet conceptually dense, these works are studies in relational perception, and create a mimetic visual to The Violent Silence.
Conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, The Shells deploys subjective forms and buildings as metaphors for vulnerability, protection, and the elegiac. Small, jewel-toned paintings offer meditative reflections on fragility and continuity; their intimacy and restraint counterbalance the more expansive, theatrical projects elsewhere in Gardner’s practice.
These landscapes act as parables—spare, liminal terrains that index spiritual itineraries. The desert and highway motifs provide a vocabulary for solitude, pilgrimage, and the mapping of interior geographies. Gardner’s mark-making here emphasizes horizon lines and the choreography of emptiness.
Perhaps Gardner’s most explicitly figurative series, The Physical addresses the body and its movements—birth, adolescence, repose, and death—encountered through painterly fragments that are at once devotional and forensic. The images trace a human grammar of posture and fall, assembling a portrait of life as a sequence of instants rather than a continuous autobiography.
Gardner’s performances are not ancillary to his paintings; they are structurally bound to the pictorial work and together constitute a total artwork. The performance suite The Infra Thin—which opens with A Violent Silence and Something at the End of the Driveway—functions as the engine of the project. Anchored in sound composition, scripted monologue, and durational presence, these pieces map personal mythologies (encounters with Rene Ricard, Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Shirley MacLaine, etc.) onto broader cultural and political histories.
A Violent Silence stages the charged moment before articulation—silence as material and as ethical measure.
Something at the End of the Driveway makes audible the moment when the Weird and the Eerie (Mark Fisher) project into the space of being, unnerving, and casting the virus which will cause the subject to undergo a change, an explicit rip in the fabric of reality; sound here is a sculptural medium that shapes the viewer’s temporal field.
The portrait-monologues (Ricard, Anderson, Mapplethorpe, Haring & Bernhard, Shirley MacLaine, Eddy and the Dyke, and the Benjamin/Angelus Novus sequence) mobilize testimony, gossip, and myth as scores—performative acts of retrieval that animate the painted surfaces in the gallery context.
In performance, voice is treated as a tool of excavation; the autobiographical becomes indexical, each utterance laying another stratum on the paintings’ histories. The performances collapse chronology: Gardner’s late-1980s New York, his Midwestern childhood calls to the stars, the downtown scenes of celebrity and crisis—these narrative vectors overlap, producing a polyphonic archive.
Gardner’s material vocabulary is diverse yet coherent: oil stick and oil on rabbit-skin glue grounds, gesso on newsprint, cardboard sculpture, collage, and found objects. The Post-Studio sensibility is evident in his repurposing of detritus and in his willingness to let nontraditional supports carry the pictorial load. Time, too, is a material: his use of durational performance, looping soundscapes, and repeated textual motifs registers time as a medium, not merely a context.
Three concerns link the portfolios and performances:
Threshold and Liminality — Gardner repeatedly privileges the moment of becoming (the “Violent Silence”) over resolved identity. Whether in the hush before a downbeat or the half-erased visage on canvas, his work asks us to attend to transitions more than outcomes.
Memory as Material — Personal and collective memory are treated as tactile resources. History (the small town, the AIDS crisis, downtown New York, post-9/11 America) is not background but substrate that his surfaces absorb and refract.
Ethics of Attention — There is an ethical demand in Gardner’s practice: to see carefully, to listen longer, and to recognize how art both reflects and constitutes the conditions of life. The work’s intimacy resists spectacle and instead models a form of critical attention.
Gardner’s work aligns with a lineage of artists who collapse medium specificity—Paul Thek’s reliquaries, Laurie Anderson’s multimedia poetics, and Mapplethorpe’s charged formalism. Yet his practice is distinct: it insists on vulnerability as method, and on memory as both archive and tool for making. His education in critical theory imbues the imagery with theoretical density while his materials and gestures preserve a direct sensoriality that avoids didacticism.
Taken together, Michael Gardner’s portfolios and performances constitute a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk—an integrated field in which painting, sculpture, voice, and sound articulate and complicate one another. The Infra Thin is less an endpoint than a practice: an ongoing negotiation between idea and execution, between the inner image and its public manifestation. This work asks viewers to linger in the narrow space where meaning is in formation, insisting that art’s most important work may be precisely this—holding open the space of possibility where imagination becomes form.
Clips from The Infra Thin can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelgardner2037
Michael Gardner (b. USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his M.A. in Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics from the California Institute of the Arts and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch Los Angeles, and A.A.S. degree in Women's Fashion Design from Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. Gardner’s work spans painting, performance, sound, and writing. Recent presentations include the Hollywood Fringe Festival (2024) and a 2022 REEF Artist Residency at CalArts. Gardner maintains an active performance and exhibition practice.
www.runswithbrushes.blogspot.com
https://www.instagram.com/michaelgardnerart/
CV
Los Angeles:
CalArts REEF Artist Residency 2022-2023
Spring Arts Collective: Monthly Lab-Shows during DTLA Art-Walks
HBO Gallery Solo Show
Art-Seen: Auction for Aids Research Alliance
LACMA: Muse Art Walk
Create/Fixate: Spring '06 Show
Spring Arts Collective: 05-09 Monthly DTLA Art Walks
New York:
The Artist Project New York Pier 92/94
Solo Show at Marlowe's presented by Sandra Bernhard, and Michele Lee
Gallery @ 49: Hells Kitchen Group Show
Houston:
MatthewTravisGallery: Group and Trio Shows
Education
M.A. California Institute of the Arts: Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics
B.A. Antioch Los Angeles: Creative Writing
A.A.S Fashion Institute of Technology: Women's Fashion Design
N.D.S.U. Textiles and Sciences/Fine Arts
Sections
Michael Gardner’s practice is a sustained interrogation of the interval that separates imagination from its materialization. Working across painting, drawing, performance, sound, and found material, Gardner investigates the fragile, charged space he names A Violent Silence—the near-invisible distance just prior creation: he performs this as the moment between the conductor's baton held aloft and the downbeat calling forth the mass of sound from a multitude of musicians. Trained in critical theory and political aesthetics, Gardner’s work synthesizes rigorous conceptual frameworks with an idiosyncratic, associative poetics that makes biography and art history sites for formal and ethical inquiry.
This survey maps a career organized around recurrent motifs—ruin and devotion, invocation and erasure, voice and hush—and a practice that consciously blurs media boundaries so that paintings function as performances, performances as reliquaries, and texts as sculptural traces.
Gardner’s artistic method is both archaeological and performative. He mines historical and autobiographical material—New York’s downtown art scene, queer subcultures, religious iconography, and pop mythologies—reconstituting them within surfaces and durations that demand close, ethical attention. Influenced by critical theorist Thierry De Duve's Infra Thin which follows Duchamp's distance-between thought and production, and Aristotle’s notion of the form already-existing within matter, Gardner treats making as revelation: forms are not invented so much as coaxed out, the artist’s gesture “releasing” what is already latent in materials, memory, and cultural debris.
His MA (Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics, CalArts) grounds the work in theoretical rigor; his practice, however, remains emphatically embodied: paint skins, rabbit-skin glue, oil sticks, found cardboard, archival detritus, and performance scores are all modalities of the same inquiry. Gardner’s Post-Studio sensibility recycles waste and readymade surfaces as substrate, continuing a lineage of artists who see the world as raw material for transfiguration.
A pivotal node in Gardner’s oeuvre, Hauntology of the Infra Thin synthesizes painting, sculpture, and performance into a staged meditation on absence and return. The project’s sewn sunflowers and melted wax crows, assemblages, and canvases—often built from repurposed materials—function as both props for live ritual and as autonomous objects that hold traces of performance. The series literalizes the work’s title: ghosts of image and idea haunt the surfaces; the works become repositories for memory, enactments of the way an imagined form lingers inside a maker before it is made.
Notably, the Ann of Amerika paintings and related portrait work appear in this body: saturated, tactile surfaces that treat portraiture as palimpsest—American iconography and personal friendship superimposed, erased, and rewritten.
Here Gardner interrogates everyday surfaces and objects—still lives that read like found photographs or sentences. By exaggerating the indexical nature of objects (a McDonald's Happy Meal, a novel, a pair of sneakers) and rendering them as painted simulacra, these works test the border between representation and fetish, between what an object signifies and what it actually is in the studio’s material economy. These most closely perform Gardner's idea that, "everything I make I call a painting."
In Gold, Gardner returns to color theory and the metaphysics of light. The paintings in this portfolio treat gold not as commodity but as a chromatic-shamanic field, calling forth the space between this world and what the shaman psychically images through for revelation; a single stroke of an enormous palette blade slices an image not unlike a lab slide forecasting and revealing what is not seen by the naked eye, alongside luminous surfaces and ladder-like structures recalling the vvitch, the seer, the prophet (e.g., Jacob’s Ladder series), and functioning as metaphors for ascent, ritual, and dimensionality. This work stages the material of cultural desire, as gold repurposes all other light within the color field: simultaneously sacred and profane, signifying both wealth and the residue of spiritual aspiration.
Text operates as image and index across these interrelated series. Gardner’s painted and photographed/scanned words of multiple sources interrupt pictorial space as much as they index systems of belief and communication. What is imprinted upon the being. Working in a tradition that spans conceptual painting and text-based practice, these works use language as both sign and surface: the painted word becomes a record of mediation, a hesitancy between reading and seeing. The pieces function as a commentary on how language constructs and distorts identity, history, and authority.
This series formally explores proximity and distance—between bodies, memories, and moments in time. Built from pared down geometric gestures and layered atmospheres, The Space Between directs attention to intervals: the pause between notes, the micro-gap where meaning consolidates. Visually spare yet conceptually dense, these works are studies in relational perception, and create a mimetic visual to The Violent Silence.
Conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, The Shells deploys subjective forms and buildings as metaphors for vulnerability, protection, and the elegiac. Small, jewel-toned paintings offer meditative reflections on fragility and continuity; their intimacy and restraint counterbalance the more expansive, theatrical projects elsewhere in Gardner’s practice.
These landscapes act as parables—spare, liminal terrains that index spiritual itineraries. The desert and highway motifs provide a vocabulary for solitude, pilgrimage, and the mapping of interior geographies. Gardner’s mark-making here emphasizes horizon lines and the choreography of emptiness.
Perhaps Gardner’s most explicitly figurative series, The Physical addresses the body and its movements—birth, adolescence, repose, and death—encountered through painterly fragments that are at once devotional and forensic. The images trace a human grammar of posture and fall, assembling a portrait of life as a sequence of instants rather than a continuous autobiography.
Gardner’s performances are not ancillary to his paintings; they are structurally bound to the pictorial work and together constitute a total artwork. The performance suite The Infra Thin—which opens with A Violent Silence and Something at the End of the Driveway—functions as the engine of the project. Anchored in sound composition, scripted monologue, and durational presence, these pieces map personal mythologies (encounters with Rene Ricard, Laurie Anderson, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring, Shirley MacLaine, etc.) onto broader cultural and political histories.
A Violent Silence stages the charged moment before articulation—silence as material and as ethical measure.
Something at the End of the Driveway makes audible the moment when the Weird and the Eerie (Mark Fisher) project into the space of being, unnerving, and casting the virus which will cause the subject to undergo a change, an explicit rip in the fabric of reality; sound here is a sculptural medium that shapes the viewer’s temporal field.
The portrait-monologues (Ricard, Anderson, Mapplethorpe, Haring & Bernhard, Shirley MacLaine, Eddy and the Dyke, and the Benjamin/Angelus Novus sequence) mobilize testimony, gossip, and myth as scores—performative acts of retrieval that animate the painted surfaces in the gallery context.
In performance, voice is treated as a tool of excavation; the autobiographical becomes indexical, each utterance laying another stratum on the paintings’ histories. The performances collapse chronology: Gardner’s late-1980s New York, his Midwestern childhood calls to the stars, the downtown scenes of celebrity and crisis—these narrative vectors overlap, producing a polyphonic archive.
Gardner’s material vocabulary is diverse yet coherent: oil stick and oil on rabbit-skin glue grounds, gesso on newsprint, cardboard sculpture, collage, and found objects. The Post-Studio sensibility is evident in his repurposing of detritus and in his willingness to let nontraditional supports carry the pictorial load. Time, too, is a material: his use of durational performance, looping soundscapes, and repeated textual motifs registers time as a medium, not merely a context.
Three concerns link the portfolios and performances:
Threshold and Liminality — Gardner repeatedly privileges the moment of becoming (the “Violent Silence”) over resolved identity. Whether in the hush before a downbeat or the half-erased visage on canvas, his work asks us to attend to transitions more than outcomes.
Memory as Material — Personal and collective memory are treated as tactile resources. History (the small town, the AIDS crisis, downtown New York, post-9/11 America) is not background but substrate that his surfaces absorb and refract.
Ethics of Attention — There is an ethical demand in Gardner’s practice: to see carefully, to listen longer, and to recognize how art both reflects and constitutes the conditions of life. The work’s intimacy resists spectacle and instead models a form of critical attention.
Gardner’s work aligns with a lineage of artists who collapse medium specificity—Paul Thek’s reliquaries, Laurie Anderson’s multimedia poetics, and Mapplethorpe’s charged formalism. Yet his practice is distinct: it insists on vulnerability as method, and on memory as both archive and tool for making. His education in critical theory imbues the imagery with theoretical density while his materials and gestures preserve a direct sensoriality that avoids didacticism.
Taken together, Michael Gardner’s portfolios and performances constitute a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk—an integrated field in which painting, sculpture, voice, and sound articulate and complicate one another. The Infra Thin is less an endpoint than a practice: an ongoing negotiation between idea and execution, between the inner image and its public manifestation. This work asks viewers to linger in the narrow space where meaning is in formation, insisting that art’s most important work may be precisely this—holding open the space of possibility where imagination becomes form.
Clips from The Infra Thin can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/@michaelgardner2037
Michael Gardner (b. USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his M.A. in Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics from the California Institute of the Arts and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch Los Angeles, and A.A.S. degree in Women's Fashion Design from Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC. Gardner’s work spans painting, performance, sound, and writing. Recent presentations include the Hollywood Fringe Festival (2024) and a 2022 REEF Artist Residency at CalArts. Gardner maintains an active performance and exhibition practice.
www.runswithbrushes.blogspot.com
https://www.instagram.com/michaelgardnerart/
CV
Los Angeles:
CalArts REEF Artist Residency 2022-2023
Spring Arts Collective: Monthly Lab-Shows during DTLA Art-Walks
HBO Gallery Solo Show
Art-Seen: Auction for Aids Research Alliance
LACMA: Muse Art Walk
Create/Fixate: Spring '06 Show
Spring Arts Collective: 05-09 Monthly DTLA Art Walks
New York:
The Artist Project New York Pier 92/94
Solo Show at Marlowe's presented by Sandra Bernhard, and Michele Lee
Gallery @ 49: Hells Kitchen Group Show
Houston:
MatthewTravisGallery: Group and Trio Shows
Education
M.A. California Institute of the Arts: Critical Theory and Political Aesthetics
B.A. Antioch Los Angeles: Creative Writing
A.A.S Fashion Institute of Technology: Women's Fashion Design
N.D.S.U. Textiles and Sciences/Fine Arts
Sections