Born in Barbados in 1961, Joscelyn Gardner moved to Canada in 2000 where she now has a studio in rural Ontario and is a Professor at Fanshawe College. A Barbados Scholar, she holds a BFA (Printmaking) and BA (Film; with Distinction) from Queen’s University and an MFA from Western University in Canada.
In the past decade Gardner has gained an international reputation for a series of works that critically engage with key issues of post-colonial legacy. These critiques are made the more demanding as Gardner employs a sophisticated language that extends the polemic into a profound visual experience.
Gardner has held solo exhibitions across the Caribbean and in the USA, Canada, and Spain, and has exhibited both prints and multimedia installations in numerous international biennials and curated group exhibitions in museums in the USA, several European countries, India, China, and the Caribbean. Public collections with major works include Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), KADIST (Paris), V & A Museum (UK), and the Barbados National Collection.
In 2011 she received the Grand Prize at the 7th International Contemporary Printmaking Biennial in Trois Rivières, Quebec, and was a Queen Sonja Print Award nominee (Norway) in 2016.
Positioned at the intersection of postcolonial feminist studies and the history of print, Joscelyn Gardner’s research-driven visual arts practice mines British / Caribbean museum collections to disrupt accepted colonial versions of Anglo-Caribbean history. Working with printmaking and moving images / sound, she draws on her (white) Creole heritage to re-insert the voices / images of women omitted from this (violent) history. Her work posits ways in which Creole women (enslaved and free) exerted political agency over their lives despite patriarchal and colonial oppression. It also aims to subvert 18th and 19th century European pictorial conventions and methods of documentation through contemporary appropriation and / or interventionist strategies.
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In the past decade Gardner has gained an international reputation for a series of works that critically engage with key issues of post-colonial legacy. These critiques are made the more demanding as Gardner employs a sophisticated language that extends the polemic into a profound visual experience.
Gardner has held solo exhibitions across the Caribbean and in the USA, Canada, and Spain, and has exhibited both prints and multimedia installations in numerous international biennials and curated group exhibitions in museums in the USA, several European countries, India, China, and the Caribbean. Public collections with major works include Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Puerto Rico, Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam), KADIST (Paris), V & A Museum (UK), and the Barbados National Collection.
In 2011 she received the Grand Prize at the 7th International Contemporary Printmaking Biennial in Trois Rivières, Quebec, and was a Queen Sonja Print Award nominee (Norway) in 2016.
Positioned at the intersection of postcolonial feminist studies and the history of print, Joscelyn Gardner’s research-driven visual arts practice mines British / Caribbean museum collections to disrupt accepted colonial versions of Anglo-Caribbean history. Working with printmaking and moving images / sound, she draws on her (white) Creole heritage to re-insert the voices / images of women omitted from this (violent) history. Her work posits ways in which Creole women (enslaved and free) exerted political agency over their lives despite patriarchal and colonial oppression. It also aims to subvert 18th and 19th century European pictorial conventions and methods of documentation through contemporary appropriation and / or interventionist strategies.
View CV
The Brighton Storeroom copyright 2021