Indulgences by James Ostrander
Opening reception: Saturday, July 25, 2026, 6 - 9 PM
Exhibitions run July 25 - August 30, 2026
Indulgences by James Ostrander is a densely detailed, absurdist approach to atelier-style painting that playfully scrutinizes the Western canon and its attendant ideologies. His work explores selfhood, embodiment, ecology, and cultural inheritance.
These works parody his struggles as a navel-gazing pseudo-Romantic, finding humor in human folly, sorrow in species-wide loneliness, absurdity in embodiment, and shame in complicity with a cultural inheritance that has privileged some at the expense of others.
Working in traditional modes of oil painting, James engages the Western canon through emulation and caricature, repurposing the sublime landscapes of Romanticism, the titillating pastorals of Rococo, and the nightmarish oddities of Surrealism. Caught between inherited ideals and disappointing realities, his painterly avatar "Orstranger” struggles through would-be Edenic landscapes, laid low by flora, fauna, and environmental waste. Orstranger mimics the gestures of the genius artist in Nature, but his clownish failures and grotesque transformations undermine his lofty goals – the artist is a fool, and his paradises are trashed.
And yet, perhaps to his credit, Orstranger maintains a plucky optimism as he navigates the false dichotomies many have mistaken for "natural" truths. He stumbles happily along the unstable boundary between human and nature, self and other, ideal and real, with a wish that viewers of Indulgences will join him in that messiness, and consider the strange and compromising roles we inherit, perform, and accept as "natural."
James Ostrander is an artist based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned a master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Notre Dame in 2022 after earning a bachelor’s in painting from Cornell College in 2013. His work has been exhibited at numerous galleries, including Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and at Kylemore Abbey Global Centre in Connemara, Ireland.
