RAIR | 2024-25

Tristram lansdowne

Tristram Lansdowne’s practice is focused on how representational space is deployed in various fields including painting, landscape and architecture. A deep focus on watercolour painting anchors his multidisciplinary practice which extends to sculpture, installation and printmaking. He holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2016) and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design (2007). Recent exhibitions include Luis De Jesus Los Angeles; CHART Gallery, NYC, New Art Projects, London, and Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides, Quebec.

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“My work explores how illusionistic space functions within images to express desire and control, and the particular kinds of pictorial embodiment that result. How do we inhabit illusionistic space, and how does that space function as a utopian arena? My practice is rooted in an exacting approach to watercolor, which I employ to ask these questions about specific forms of image, paying particular attention to the effects of globalized design culture and digital imaging technologies. My current watercolor series combines different modes of address in painting using a strategy of successively recessed spaces. Thematically disparate, they are focused on the structural aspects of illusionism and draw from wide-ranging traditions of compressed space such as Van Eyck’s grisaille figures, architectural cartouches, trompe-l'oeil painting and computer desktop design. By bringing these many strands together I hope to explore spatial compression as a wide-ranging mode of visual organization that taps into the slippages and pile ups that occur inadvertently as we immerse ourselves in the image commons.”

See more of Tristram’s work here.