A LITTLE ABOUT HIM

Biography

Adam Gourlay is a Toronto-based artist and comedian. 

He has performed across North America and produced & performed shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018 and 2019.

He loves to paint how he feels, write and direct short movies, create books, and tell stories on stage.

ABOUT HIS PROCESS

His Work

A multi-disciplinary artist- Gourlay focuses on painting, drawing, and performance. His paintings focus on humour, abstracting material processes, and a surreal comical approach, that he lovingly refers to as "Motel Art". His black-and-white drawings find humour in a very specific way, as he often uses juvenile expression to prompt complicated ideas and issues.

His most recent work explores humour, honesty, memory, and truth. Key to this exploration is finding the balance between the maximal and the minimal, both in terms of composition, movements, stories, colours, and information. Experiments in application, additive methods, subtractive methods, and mark-making become part of the story of the work and are integral to the process. Most of the substrates he paints on, and the tools he uses are repurposed or upcycled. These abstracted stories allow him to explore how objects, the land and people hold memory and how time, experience, and the stories we tell ourselves will distort it.