Gardar Eide Einarsson

The group of work that makes up the exhibition of works by Gardar Eide Einarsson revolves around concerns of how to relate, and how to resist, as an individual in the face of institutions and power structures whose ideologies might not align with one’s own.

The painting The Spirit of Zen; a Way of Life, Work and Art in the Far East, based on an older paperback edition of Alan Watts seminal introduction of Zen Buddhism to western audiences, represents the strategy of exile, whether internal or physical, and with an autobiographical nod to the artist’s own relocation from the US to Japan.

Two other series of works in the show reproduce material from recently declassified official US Government manuals on resistance strategies for citizens living under a hostile or illegitimate government.

The strategies described by the work in the show run the gamut from exile, through cultural production through acts of physical resistance while offering no clue as to their efficacy or their desirability. It also raises the question regarding what choices an individual should make in order to live a productive, moral life in precarious times.