Finished: Zach Taylor and Aaron Williams
Opening October 29-December 4, 2010
Opening Reception for the Artists, October 29th, 6-9pm
Project Space: Min Hyung – “Fifth World: Introduction”
Linda Warren Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Finished” a collaborative solo exhibition of work by Zach Taylor and Aaron Williams. “Finished” is a multi-media show, consisting of several large-scale paintings, drawings, and assemblage collage. A freestanding sculpture and an interactive, kinetic, sound and performance piece have also been created by both artists who effectively and adroitly work in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional mediums. Though both are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Taylor graduating with his BFA in 1999 with a focus in Painting and Printmaking, and Williams in 1999 with a BFA concentration in sound and sculpture and an MFA in 2005 in sound, film and new media) they met just a few years ago in Los Angeles and formed a creative kinship which originally arose out of an interest to breathe fresh life into each other’s unfinished artwork. Common interests in art, music, film, pop culture, mass media, advertising, nostalgia, handiwork, mechanics, women, and all things beautiful, used, potentially funny, absurd and weird, gave them plenty to talk about. Producing artwork together and combining their myriad talents was at once logical, exciting and experimental.
As Taylor writes, “The beginning was about bringing old drawings, unfinished paintings, and plans for unmade work, and work to be remade, together. Lay everything out and start looking for interesting connections between projects. Literally place drawings next to one another and connect them, take sculptures apart and redesign them, let someone else try to see the end of an unfinished piece of art and push it in a completely new direction.“ Analogizing themselves to a “two man band” (they both are also musicians, Williams also a music producer) or a “driver and navigator” in the Baja 1000 (they are both into cars– though Taylor so much so, that he is currently enrolled in a professional stunt driving program) - the creative process - the collaboration itself – became both the subject of the artwork itself as well as the wild card in their well-loaded tool belt, as they headed for a finished, or completed, result. Their separate narratives were subordinated into an interactive one and conscious effort was made to stylistically average them out so that the artwork would appear to have been made by one hand.
Often each work was furthered when the other was out of the studio and moved along according to what each thought was being dictated by the piece itself, siphoned of course, through their own understandings of what was going on at all, with both the piece and the other artist involved. As William states, “It isn’t a taskmaster to present drastically different styles in apparent juxtapositions within the same piece. Rather, the course a piece makes is preceded by, and conducted during conversations. A conversation may be directed at considering compositional and narrative strategies, but moreover they interrogate interests, values, consumptive patterns, desires, humor, acknowledged punch lines, and limits of respective knowledge bases. Through language, a conversation reveals information that is at once available for evaluation, containable, and transducible to visual information. As an image/value is revealed it is applied. As an image/value is applied others will invariably reveal themselves and be folded into the previous and the next.”
Sometimes it appears that the conversation might have started and ended quickly, as in “OX”, the plaster sculpture planted firmly on the Burro Brand sawhorse. But in most cases, the interchange continued for months, apparent in the visually loaded large-scale paintings (four of them are 8’ x 8’ acrylic and/oil on panels), and two-dimensional assemblages and elegant, intricate drawings. Op art, pop art, surrealism, romanticism, abstraction, graphic design, new media, old media, are at play in one form or another in this multi-sensory exhibition.
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Zach Taylor and Aaron William
Exercise in Failure (in progress), 2010 |
“Exercise in Failure”, the “mechano-interactive sculpture” which will be performed on opening night is a project resurrected from William’s past. It’s funky homemade quality, a la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang but with a purpose all its own, belies the formidable task of making this object actually function. Hand-tooled from bicycle parts, golf cart gears, phonographs, turntables, horns, copper tubing, douglas fir and a cacophony of cogs and gadgetry, the intent of the sculpture is to make a new sound by mixing the music of two vinyl record albums. The rider pedals at great speed to accomplish this task. The results will vary and the experience will be, like collaboration itself, infused with the sense of experimentation, a freshness of communication, and an opportunity for a unique narrative to develop for each individual viewer.
In the Project Space this month we are excited to present the wild and dramatic paintings by up and coming Toronto-based artist Min Hyung. The paintings belong to a body of on-going series she calls “The Fifth World: Introduction”. As in the work by Taylor and Williams, a wide-range of painting traditions emerge in these dauntlessly executed mixed-media works, which tell the tale spun from Hyung’s vivid imagination about a place populated by an ape-like cast of characters and their mores, values and rituals. Hyung has considered her world at length, and provides enriching text which furthers our understanding of her many unusual characters’ unique personalities (Homan, Makki, Sutak, Tang Tang and others), their interests, weaknesses and strengths, as well as details about their most significant act of procreation – the mating ritual – “99 Days” – which is featured in some of the paintings as well. The paintings, like the epic tale itself, are full of passion and mystery, beauty and sadness, chaos and order, and other archetypes throughout time.
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Min Hyung
Homan 4,
2010
oil on canvas, 60” x 48” |
Zach Taylor’s work has been shown numerous times at the gallery and this marks his second solo exhibition at LWG. He has shown in galleries throughout the United States, including a recent solo show at DIY Gallery in Los Angeles with Aaron Williams. This marks Williams first appearance at the gallery. Min Hyung received her BA in Korean Literature (Poetry) at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul, Korean and her BFA in 2009 in Drawing and Painting at Ontario College Art & Design in Toronto, Canada. She has had a solo exhibition at Skew Gallery in Calgary, where she is also represented, and has an upcoming solo exhibition in NYC at Freight in Volume in the Spring of 2011 as well as one here in December of 2011.
For more information about this show, or to request more images, please contact Chris Smith at chris@lindawarrengallery.com or 312-432-9500.
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