Our ability to differentiate colors plays a central role in our navigation in the world and to make the right choices. The human eye can see about 16 million different color shades, so even the slightest differences in a tint of a color on a given object can make us choose or deselect it. The window for what is perceived as beautiful or ugly is therefore extremely fine and it is this study of sensitivity to color aesthetics that is fundamental to the exhibition.

In Jay Gard's second solo exhibition Colors at Gether Contemporary, he investigates the nature of colors, their ability to communicate and to influence and effect their surroundings. The overall elements of the exhibition are Gard's color wheels on screen prints and sculptures. The color wheels serve as a tool that allows Gard to explore and explain how colors appear in different situations and how they can change our perception of objects and contexts.

Gard is strongly inspired by the great German tradition of ranking and systematizing colors and elements. In particular, Josef Albers and his book The Interaction of Colors, in which he studies the effects of color on each other, plays an important role in the exhibition and in connection with Gard's color studies in general. Albers works, among other things, by placing two colors next to each other, and investigating how the impression of the two colors changes. A dark color next to a light causes the light color to appear deeper and more intense and thereby changes character. A color is thus not just a color, but is part of other colors too, where it both delivers color to its surroundings, while it is also influenced by the colors surrounding it.

Albers two-color studies are directly referenced in Gard's moving sculptures in the exhibition. A wheel of color samples continuously rotates and makes new color configurations and thus exposes the influence of the colors on each other. These color machines point towards Gard's great craftsmanship and the built-in material quality that permeates all of his artistic work. Jay Gard does not create works he produces them. Systematically, he examines constellations of colors and materials, to become wiser about how we read contexts, and how objects and elements work together and separately.

The work in the studio is in constant motion and conducts an inexhaustible study of how our world is linked from an aesthetic perspective. Gard's colors wheels become an expression of this process and method, which has its roots a long way back in the history of art, including Goethe's and Johannes Itten's circular color studies as a starting point. The color studies are an expression of the driving force in human restlessness, and our search to understand.