Palmer Art Projects is please to present Scott Gardiner's solo exhibition Three Oceans Project (Sydney) at Sydney Contemporary between 10 - 13 September 2015.  

In February 2015 Gardiner travelled to Sri Lanka as part one of the Three Oceans Project, which developed out of two earlier exhibitions the previous year in New Zealand at Paul Nache in Gisborne and at Whitespace in Auckland. The Three Oceans Project brings together three coastal locations important and familiar to Gardiner: Hikkaduwa in Sri Lanka, Sydney in Australia and Gisborne, NZ. 

As a dedicated surfer, Scott Gardiner’s passion for the ocean is immediately obvious in his paintings. Surfing is an intense physical interaction with the ocean’s surface. Modernist painting is an intense mental interaction with the surface of a canvas. Gardiner’s paintings spring from an intersection of the two; a distillation of the ephemeral qualities of light and motion on water rendered in pigment where the ocean is obviously a very powerful creative space for him. They are crystal-clear vessels of alchemical metamorphosis and transcendence. They change as you look at them. You can taste the salt in their sunlight.

Geometry, evolving out of earlier Gardiner motifs of motorways and overpasses, reflects an impulse to fixed order and control projected onto the chaotic, fractal and ever evolving organic forms of nature. Even these Apollonian geometries must eventually be eroded away by the Dionysian ocean they seek to occupy and master. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.

Scott Gardiner (b.1975) graduated with a Master of Visual Arts with Honours in painting from Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and since then has been many times a finalist in New Zealand’s Wallace Art Awards and the 2012 New Zealand Painting and Printmaking Award. His work is held in private and corporate collections throughout New Zealand (including the Sir James Wallace Arts Trust), the United States and Australia.