303 Gallery is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition of watercolor and oil paintings by Tim Gardner.
Snapshots are the source of these post adolescent scenes which depict young men in their moments of freedom; sunny, demonstrative images of what is for the artist an idealized past. These young men catch tennis balls in their shorts, show off new cars in the driveway, drink beer and trampoline simultaneously, and gaze back at you from mountain landscapes or amid sea and sand. Others depict a theater of vagaries at night; running the naked mile, skinny-dipping in public pools, or settling down for the night on a park bench.
As an outsider once resistant to his own rite of passage to adulthood, the artist describes this transition as a period not of struggle but of lost freedom. The subjects of these images are not localized as in the work of Larry Clark or Richard Billingham, but exist in between the familial and the culture at large. They are looked at critically, as if a study of a foreign culture through its own representation.
From the way these young men carry themselves you know they believe adulthood yields nothing but tedium. Groups of friends or singular figures are perfectly at ease in their isolation from adult power structures. Occasionally a father figure will appear showing that he too, remembers this time and thus becomes a catalyst, activating the young men even further.