Michael Gaillard lives and works in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY. Educated at Stanford (BA, Visual Art) and Columbia (MFA, Visual Art), Gaillard has become known for his landscape photography while also using that practice as a catalyst for a broad spectrum of thematic exploratiions that address the nature of landscape and our roles within it, focusing on details that speak to a greater whole, asking questions about the narratives we construct, the images we produce, and the marks that we leave behind. Using the precision of his technique to isolate and represent symbols rich with contradictions, bending the space between the real and the represented, the screen and the projection.

Gaillard's time in the landscape serves many purposes, artistic and technical, to be sure, but also as meditation, achieving an almost euphoric deep focus, he becomes aware of easily-overlooked subtleties and symbols in the landscape that speak volumes. In the landscape, Gaillard experiments with new compositional and technical strategies, encountering formal and technical boundaries as he explores and observes, constantly honing his craft and developing methods that he later employs to specific ends within his thematic explorations. Throughout his time roaming the landscape, Gaillard's remains instinctively aware of his surroundings and what they might reveal. Threads of inquiry, interwoven throughout his practice, are gradually populated by new observations that enrich and deepen these subjects, filling each vessel over time, to be explored and unpacked as part of the works referenced in the Unique Work section of this website.

Gaillard's practice consists of landscape work offered in limited editions in an array of sizes, and thematic work comprised of pieces that exist as singular artworks, without editions, each at a fixed size that is integral to the experience of that work within both the thematic and spatial context it occupies. Rather than reveal the content of his thematic work on this platform, Gaillard prefers to open up conversations that lead to a more engaged and thoughtful presentation, both in private studio visits and through email correspondence, as well as in forthcoming exhibitions that will be announced via his occasional newsletters and in the Thoughts section of this site.