Michael Gaillard, b. 1979, is from the island of Nantucket and a graduate of Nantucket High School. He has lived in Brooklyn and New York City for over a decade, and graduated from Columbia University with his MFA in 2010. In 2007, he received a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and in 2003, he received his BA from Stanford University. He had his first solo exhibition at Scaramouche in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and has had solo exhibitions for five summers at the Seven Seas Gallery in Nantucket before opening Michael Gaillard Studio in June of 2014. His work is featured in hundreds of private collections worldwide. In the summer of 2015, many of Gaillard’s works were featured at the Bristol Art Museum in Rhode Island.
Michael Gaillard Studio features works from Michael Gaillard’s diverse fine-art photography practice. This year, all works on display this season are part of his ongoing portrait of the landscape of Nantucket. Most are new this year, as many works from previous years have sold out of their editions. In addition, Gaillard’s portfolio is available for viewing in the rear of the gallery. Please see the attendant to be taken through many more new works in the collection and the classic images that are nearing, or have concluded their editions.
All these landscapes are initially offered in four sizes, each in a small limited edition. In order to achieve the scale and clarity evidenced in his images, Gaillard uses an 8 x 10 film camera for his landscape work (the same type of camera employed by Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams). He then uses a drum scanner (the highest-quality digitization technology) to convert the image to a digital file from which the final print is made in his Brooklyn studio.
Gaillard’s landscapes function less as windows and more as atmospheres—vessels of light and air that aim to reproduce in his audience the essential feeling of being in a place, as opposed to merely functioning as an image depicting a scene, a moment, or a particular location. They exist not just as documents of record, but as conduits of sensation. Drawing parallels to 19th-century landscape painting traditions, color-field painting, and the New Topographics photography movement, the work hovers between representation and abstraction—conveying the character of the space depicted, while allowing this perspective to function simultaneously as color and form.