Paul Taylor

Instagram: @paultaylor_art

Website: http://www.paultaylor-art.com

Bio: Paul Taylor was born in Minnesota and lives in Oakland, CA. He received a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from the University of California, Davis. Paul works across multiple media including sculpture/installation, video, performance, photography, and drawing. His work explores the effects of increased digital immersion on the ways we connect to each other and the world around us. In the last few years, his inquiries have expanded to encompass the relationship between loss, disappearance, and memory. Paul has exhibited his work at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA; and Roundweather Gallery in Oakland, among others. His videos have screened at festivals nationally and internationally. Paul has published articles in the Parsons Journal of Information Mapping and Media-N Journal. Paul’s alter ego runs a small business designing and building custom furniture.

Statement: My drawings record rectilinear, minimal forms that fade into the background. There is a tension between the objects themselves, created digitally and transferred to the page mechanically in a white, dry medium, and the backgrounds laid down in ink, a liquid medium that is hard to control. Originally inspired by the vestigial military structures in the Marin Headlands, some of these objects take on an element of melancholy. Their original function has faded away and they are in the process of being subsumed by the landscape. For me, the figures in these drawings carry an element of loss—loss of people and things, but also of memories—as they appear to be only partially there, or perhaps in the process of fading away. However, the figures are also fleshed out by the layers of ink that make up their background. They are located on the page and defined by their environment, in much the same way that we are grounded and defined by the environments we inhabit.