Jack Gardner | SEA SILENCE

“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” – Giorgio de Chirico

The black-and-white photographs featured in the Sea Silence exhibition were inspired by the haunting paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian artist and writer who founded the scuola metafisica art movement that profoundly influenced the surrealists. Chirico’s most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. The paintings reflect his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace in Greece.

At the request of Andres Duany, the town planner for Seaside, Rosemary Beach, and Alys Beach,  architect and urbanist Dhiru Thadani analyzed Chirico’s paintings and commissioned photographer Jack Gardner to brilliantly interpret and execute a surrealist vision of Seaside on behalf of its founders, The Davis Family. The photographs were taken in the spring of 2020 during the height of the pandemic when the consequence of health-safety restrictions was a desolate townscape for the first time in Seaside’s forty-year history.  Under Gardner’s creative direction, models Tabitha Miller and Michael Hall, added beauty, mystery, and the dimension of the solitary human scale to the photographs. 

Featured Image: “Untitled” by Jack Gardner. 40” x 60”