Gareth James is an internationally exhibited artist, previously based in London and New York before joining the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2010. James has an abiding interest in histories of iconoclasm in which the social divisions and inequities that mark and delimit artistic practice are registered most emphatically. In his practice as an artist and as a writer, conventional aesthetic discourse is lost and rediscovered in neighboring fields such as topology or psychoanalysis; capitalist property relations are seen to exert as much determinative force on the visual field as phenomenological bodies; and theoretical materials are indistinct from physical ones in an incipient philosophy of materials.

James was a founding member of Orchard, a cooperatively organized gallery in New York's Lower East Side from 2005-8, and he is a founding editor, along with fellow artists Sam Lewitt and Cheyney Thompson, of Scorched Earth, a forthcoming journal devoted to questions concerning drawing. His work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, including Portikus (Frankfurt), Kunstwerke (Berlin), the Institute of Contemporary Art (London), PS1 Center for Contemporary Art (Long Island City, New York), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York). He has had recent solo exhibitions at Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne; Franco Soffiantino Arte Contemporanea, Torino; and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York.