Ken holds a Dip. Interpretive Illustration from Sheridan College (2000), a B.Design (minor Art History, Visual Culture) from Thompson Rivers University (2009), and an MSc in Media and Communications from The London School of Economics (2012). In addition to Visual Art, he works as a Commercial Illustrator (represented by JBCS in the US) and is Director, Data Strategy & Econometrics at Cossette Media. At its core, his art work work explores the intersections between mathematics and visual abstraction.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Ken Gamage’s pictorial abstractions weave together the interactions between reverberating color, compositional dynamics, textural marks, and contrasting soft and hard-edged shape formations into unstable systems of logic. Each individual pictorial form is an opaque signifier, yet the ‘magical’ utterance of a logical orchestration of inter-dependent order conjures an alternative field of productive and shifting meaning(s).

Each image represents the indexical trace of the artist’s ritual of (re-)constructing meaning, myth, and narrative as a marked shadow of the mechanism of our primordial drive to inflict meaning itself as response to the anxiety of an underlining nihilism. It is this array of mediated tensions between belief/nihilism, serenity/anxiety, rationalism/irrationalism, signifier/signified, imagined/real that the restlessness of the human condition operates within as the imperative creative medium. Inspiration is drawn from mathematics, graffiti art, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, data science, abstract expressionism, musical composition, Buddhism, and children’s markings.