Adam Gourlay

Adam Gourlay is an interdisciplinary artist that focuses on painting, drawing, and performance.

His most recent work involves exploring 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 distorts it.

He has performed stand-up and sketch comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and across North America. His comedic experiences, especially improv and a mathematical approach to humour, impact his visual art. He has blended his love of comedy and visual art together to create a surreal style he refers to as 'Motel Art', which finds humour in the everyday and in very specific ways.

His work has been shown at the An Nasctha Gallery in Liverpool, and the Ada Slaight Gallery in Toronto. He has created works with the OSA and Ontario Archives, self-published a book of drawings called “Fuzzy Brain” and created a zine called, “Bob Ross Burned Down the White House".