TAYLOR ANTON WHITE: Free_Hotdog.pdf
Monica King Contemporary, 32 Lispenard Street, New York, NY
January 31 - March 14, 2020
Monica King Contemporary presents the first solo exhibition in New York City of Taylor Anton White, Free_Hotdog.pdf. The exhibition features new mixed-media compositions in the artist’s signature exuberant and multifaceted style, which consist of what White describes as contradictory elements that should be discordant but somehow come together to exist in a state of tenuous balance.
White’s art defies categorization-amalgamating abstraction, text, found objects, and clearly defined imagery-sometimes all within a single work. He utilizes a vast spectrum of potential media in his practice, ranging from spiral bindings, spray paint, and charcoal to at times incorporating inversed images of his own children’s drawings, which calls into question entrenched notions of artistic ownership. His highly-layered, textural, and often three-dimensional paintings embody the many faces of divergence-crisis and triumph, momentum and confinement, among many others, and challenge the viewer to locate his unconventional materials and artistic methods within the usual confinement of art history.
White’s improvisational approach to creating his work is partially rooted in his exposure to performance art early in his career, which he describes as helping him “loosen up” to be able to make work so rife with spontaneous gestures. White explains that one of his primary motivations to create art is to make himself laugh. He is drawn to naïve subject matter the irreverence of which, especially in the context of fine art, allows for a greater sense of creative freedom.
Yet in keeping with his delightfully contradictory practice, closer inspection of his seemingly impromptu compositions unveils the meticulous labor and attention to detail White dedicates to his work. This “stop and go,” as White describes it, of bold and rapid gestures with that which takes great care is intrinsic to the contradictory nature of his work. For instance, this can be seen through White’s use in many of his works of an industrial sewing machine. The delicacy of sewing, traditionally associated to women’s work, is juxtaposed with his work’s large-scale abstraction, which is typically ascribed to masculinity. White states that he revels in “smashing all of that together,” an inclination that can be hastily interpreted as simple irreverence but, like the complexity of White’s formal practice, reveals a nuanced exploration and testing of the status quo. Yet far from creating heavy handed discourse, White’s radicality is expressed with joy and humor and creating serious work that doesn’t take itself seriously.
IMAGE: ARTFORUM, January 2020
Installation photography by Angela Pham
