Zin Taylor1646, The Hague

It looks like ‘The Illustrator’ got hungry while he was drawing on the pristine white gallery walls. Judging from his drawings, it appears ‘The Illustrator’ likes sandwiches – a retro, stacked club, spiked through with an olive-topped cocktail stick, could be a preference, but a squishy cheeseburger might also do. I can relate. At work, I often wish I could conjure up the food I imagine, and that it would pop out of my mind and into my hand just like it does in cartoons.

These may be Zin Taylor’s thoughts materializing around the project space 1646, but he would prefer that we don’t confuse him, the artist, with the namesake of his show. At least that’s what he asserted in a prefatory conversation with artist Scott Lyall, which was also published for the occasion. The pro-tocol at 1646 calls for each exhibition to be accompanied by a printed transcript of a conversation between the artist and an unfa-miliar partner, and ‘a background night’ pre-senting the artists’ ideas and practice. This laudable effort is meant to introduce the audience to the work, and to situate the exhibition itself in a process, rather than see it as the end game.

According to Taylor, if ‘The Illustrator’ is a character, he is one that embodies ‘an idea’, ‘a title’ and ‘a tool for a certain kind of description’. But remaining in this conceptual realm – rather than anthropomorphizing Taylor’s designated idea, title and tool – is far from easy. I couldn’t resist the urge to attrib-ute authorship to the elements in this exhibi-tion, which consisted of larger-than-life (mostly) figurative line drawings directly on the gallery walls made with a 15mm chisel-head black acrylic marker. To be painted over when the exhibition ends, they could be seen as grammatical units in a pictorial phrase or as continuous visual composition, depending on how synthetically or partially one reads. In addition, black dots were scattered over one wall (a sure nod to Taylor’s ongoing body of work known as ‘The Story of Stripes and Dots’, begun in 2012), and two sculpture-mobiles drifted in that peculiar, passive way when an air current happened to disturb them.

B E l G i U MT H E n E T H E r l a n D S

The first mobile was the sole occupant of the front gallery space and is succinctly described by its title: A string of eyeballs, a spectrum of colour, a structure of form in black and white (2013). Two upside-down L-shapes hung from one side of a thin horizon-tal bar painted the colours of the spectrum: the thicker upside-down L-shape was white and covered with a black grid; the other, reedier L was solid black. Their companion, a long chain of papier-mâché eyeballs threaded onto string, reminding me of one of those elastic candy bracelets you can nibble on. Dramatically lit, the mobiles’ wavering shadows swished around the walls and floor, as if cast from a magic lantern. The second mobile, Expressive Device (Leaf Voids) (2014), had four white discs dangling from an invisible wire and hung in the back space, but it was overshadowed by a wall-drawing of what looked like a giant potato.

In the accompanying conversation with Lyall, Taylor refers to the drawings as ‘carica-tures’ and to the gallery space as a ‘void’ – terms analogous with ‘writing’ and ‘thinking’ that help him to identify a distinctive style of mark-making that emerges from pensive moments (which others might refer to as doo-dling). An ostrich, an alphabet and a squat brick structure set amidst sparse blades of grass populate one wall. There’s no real point in try-ing to cohere all the wall drawings into a narra-tive but it is tempting to play that game with the image of two hippies and a third figure, comprised only of legs and a body dissolving into bubbly vapour, standing beside a drawn mini-exhibition of works resembling some other ‘real’ sculptures and paintings by Taylor. To illustrate means to provide clarity or enlighten through an example. With this exhibi-tion, Taylor effectively turned the walls into a recursive and dynamic space, a setting for artistic thinking, rather than merely a surface for inscribing shapes.

ViVian SKy rEHBErG

allEGory of THE CaVE PainTinGExtra City Kunsthal and Middelheim Museum, Antwerp

‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’, curated by Extra City Kunsthal’s artistic director Mihnea Mircan, put forward a radical thesis. The source from which it unfolds is a group of cave paintings in North Western Australia known as the Bradshaw paintings, estimated to be at least 26,000 years old. In 2010, an examination of the paintings found them to be colonized by bacteria and funghi, which had formed a film of living pigment over the works that lend the paintings an extraordinary richness of colour. In this perpetual state of self-painting, the bacteria etch them-selves deeper into the rock, creating a frame around the images, which preserves them. These living paintings are, according to Mircan, ‘a product of prehistory, of a paradigm that pairs life, knowledge, image and world in ways we can only speculate upon’. Mircan’s thesis, then, is to call into question fundamental notions of origin and intent, contamination and colonization, and image and embodiment.

The show, split over two venues, opened at Extra City Kunsthal with an introduction to the Bradshaw paintings via a documen-tary, a series of books and a text. Following this, Sven Johne’s brilliant film Greatest Show on Earth (2011) was a humorous, poignant introduction to the rest of the show: German actor Gottfried Richter drolly recounts a tale of the most daring, exciting, unfathomably brilliant circus there ever was. Foreshadowing this grandiose rhetoric is the inevitability of the promise being

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Zin Taylor in his studio in Brussels, Belgium, September 2014 photo Natalie hill

By DaviD Macfarlane

In Brussels, where revolutionaries have often lived but revolutions hardly ever happen, Canadian artist Zin Taylor is with a group of friends at the Monday market. It is a soft, grey evening and the square in front of the Saint-Gilles town hall has come alive with a community that is not at all what people who don’t know con-temporary Brussels expect to find here.

Saint-Gilles has its own town hall—and an impressive one at that. But it’s not a town. It’s a neighbourhood, really. “Kind of the funky part of Brussels,” is the description that settled in with me during my visit. “Funky” and “Brussels” being two words I’m not sure I’d previously used in the same sentence.

Saint-Gilles is where Taylor has lived since 2008. He shares an apartment with his partner, Emilie Lauriola. It’s a walk-up—“five glorious floors,” Taylor says, speaking as someone who has lugged furniture up all of them—and it could be used in a recruitment film designed to encourage young Canadians to run away to Europe and become artists. Its high white ceilings, old wooden floors, vintage-store rattan furniture and modest, Spartan elegance are, well, perfect.

A few vinyl records are stacked neatly against the old fireplace, Sun Araw is on the Philips turntable and posters for Martin Kippen-berger’s METRO-Net subway installation in Dawson City and for an

unnoticed truths Zin taylor’s european adventure

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exhibition by Belgian artist Sophie Nys are tacked on the white walls.There are plants, but just a few. There are shells, but not many, and they

seem to be placed exactly where you’d like to have a shell. There is lots of light. There are books on Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislav-sky, Antwerp-born architect Henry van de Velde and Belgian dancer, artist and choreographer Akarova on bookshelves that give the impression of being bookshelves in use, as opposed to being bookshelves for decoration. Taylor’s studio (a busily cluttered work area in a former industrial building, now an artists’ co-op) is a 15-minute walk away. Through a park. With wild parrots. As I said: perfect.

Taylor settled in Saint-Gilles in 2008, a year after his first Brussels show and the same year that his book The Crystal Ship was published by Bywater Bros. Editions of Toronto and Belgium-based group Etablissement d’en face projects. If the creation of the charming domestic space that he and Lauriola share was (to use a Taylor-ism) “the skin of his negotiations” with the idea of his belonging in Europe, The Crystal Ship was his inves-tigation into the deeper and more secret dimensions of the places we choose. Or that choose us.

Typically, for Taylor, The Crystal Ship was a hybrid of disciplines and tropes. Taylor rarely thinks about drawing (“propositional, like handwriting”) without thinking of painting (“building up layers”) without thinking of music without thinking of words without thinking of sculptural forms without thinking of performance. He’s the kind of creator who is described as an installation artist more than a sculptor or painter or writer, but it’s not always clear that he sees much of a dividing line between installation and object and text. He’s equally nonplussed by the distinction between a book and a book launch—both are performances, as far as he is concerned. The photographs in The Crystal Ship (shown on slides during the book’s launch while Taylor read in the garden of the site the work is based on)

play whimsically with the contrast between Taylor’s elemental sculptural forms and the pristine, slightly sinister aspect of the borrowed museum vitrines that housed them. That housed them, as a matter of fact, in the BELvue Museum in Brussels.

What’s documenting what? It’s often a good question in contemporary art. And it’s the kind of playfully funny question that Taylor’s work invites.In a list of what he really likes, humour is number two. Louise Bourgeois is number one—although his second choice, delivered with a sly twinkle, makes it unclear whether he’s being serious about the first.

“Conceived as an artist’s book, lecture, and sculptural installation,” as the artists describes it, The Crystal Ship was a tracing, of sorts, of the work-ing practices of revolutionary Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist Marcel Broodthaers, and the Antwerp neighbourhood where in 1969 the now-defunct gallery A379089 showed what Taylor’s text describes as “one instalment of his museological displays.”

This is the world Taylor explores—the hidden histories of alignments nobody else notices. He’s someone who takes obvious delight in graceful proportion. On the walk to his studio there are rooflines and windows and trolley tracks that seem to him so beautifully organic to Brussels that he stops and takes them in. He often stops and takes things in. That’s what he did when the idea for The Crystal Ship began to form in Antwerp, and it was a scale of things that he discovered.

He felt that he had broken a code of a secret measurement in his identification of points of local geography that were connected by noth-ing more or less important than the fact that he was connecting them. In his investigation of an address that is now an Antwerp children’s clothing store and bears no trace of its earlier incarnation as the cryptic-ally named A379089, Taylor created iterations, repetitions and variations of the mysterious crystalline form that he conceived as being beneath a more literal surface.

The Crystal Ship probably mystified more than a few patrons of the BELvue Museum, but it was an important European toehold for Taylor. For someone who presents himself as laconic and easygoing, he is sur-prisingly strategic in creating a network of aesthetic and curatorial con-nections. The Crystal Ship solidified his association with Etablissement d’en face projects. The loose collective eventually became part of the community of friends, fellow artists and associates with whom, as he puts it, he “works and hangs out.” In fact, many of them were part of the gathering in the soft, grey evening on the square in front of the Saint-Gilles town hall where this article began—and where, back in the present tense, we left Taylor.

The Monday market happens every week, and as a result of this regularity it is so convivial it’s almost boisterous. In fact, by what I’d previously imagined to be Belgian standards, it is boisterous. It feels like a party well underway.

So let’s call him Zin. Everybody at the Monday market does. In fact, I’m not sure that there’s anyone who doesn’t. During my visits to Jessica Bradley Gallery in Toronto last winter to see “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7),” his most recent Canadian show (and fourth solo exhibition with the gallery), and during the five days I recently spent in his company in what proved itself to be the surprising city of Brussels, I never heard anyone use Taylor.

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opposite: Zin Taylor The Crystal Ship (detail) 2008 Sculpey, papier-mâché, card stock, aluminum foil, vitrines and fluorescent lights

Zin Taylor The Crystal Ship (detail of artist’s book) 2008 Courtesy Bywater

Bros./etaBlissemeNt d’eN faCe

proJeCts, Brussels

Vitrines: 2 m x 1.3 m x 45 cm each iNstallatioN at Belvue

museum, Brussels Courtesy

JessiCa Bradley Gallery/

supportiCo lopez, BerliN

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Tammi Campbell in her Saskatoon studio, January 2014 photo matt ramaGe

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“My parents knew someone else who called their child Zin,” he told me when I asked about his name. There is here a characteristic pause. It is expressionless, but it has the effect of a raised eyebrow.

It’s weird how provisional everything is. That’s part of what the pause says.

Zin likes words like “weird.” And “dude.” And “cool.” Some things “suck.” A lot of things are “fucked up.” There are sometimes occurrences or events or twists of fate or outcomes of work or miracles of creativity that are “totally bananas.” He uses these kinds of words often—often, it seems, to fend off art-speak, although it would be a mistake to think of him as anti-intellectual in his sharp understanding of his own work or the work of artists he admires (late American artist Mike Kelley being a case in point). So it is, therefore, contextually appropriate to say that it’s kind of cool that an artist whose work searches so playfully for new significances has a first name with origins of no personal significance at all. Zin says he likes things that don’t exist until he makes them. That’s also what his expressionless pause says.

He likes to give the impression that he runs his career as casually as he lights his cigarettes, but the pace and output of solo exhibitions, perform-ances, group shows, collaborations, residencies and publications over the past seven years don’t make a very convincing case for an un-driven nature.

So it’s not that he’s stingy when it comes to explanation. He’s usually courteously polite. He likes people who are interested in what he’s doing. In fact, he likes to communicate.

There’s an unfussy friendliness to Zin that is anything but elitist. (When I ask him about the sources of his theoretical heritage, the first book he cites is Greil Marcus’s meditation on the cultural meaning of the Sex Pistols, Lipstick Traces. When I ask about early influences, he tells me about a San Francisco skateboard magazine called Slap that he stumbled on in Calgary when he was 12.) If he appears arrogant, it’s the arrogance of an artist who isn’t going to get too hung up on explaining that when he creates a series called Wood and Dust (2010), it’s going to be a series that is about wood and dust.

In the interstitial gestures that comprise the oddly convincing gram-mar of his weirdly eloquent narratives, things pretty much are what they are. The soundscape, the Calder-like shapes in air and the unfolding sequence of the evocative drawings in “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” oblige observers to steer clear of imagined metaphor or juiced-up aesthetic theory and stick to the elements at hand: stripes and dots. That’s kind of the point.

“Nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false,” Marcus wrote in Lipstick Traces—which is pretty much the point of disbelief from which Zin sets out to create his own strange and (by others) unnoticed truths. “A curve is a more interesting line,” is the kind of thing he likes to say. “I like things that do things,” he said to me in a tone of voice that was freighted with no more meaningfulness than “I like Belgian beer”— which, by the way, he does.

So it’s not that Zin doesn’t speak about what he does or who he is. It’s just that his voice is as unimpressed with my line of inquiry about where Zin comes from as his shrug. “It’s just a name my parents liked,” he says.

But it is a cool name, you have to admit. And coolness is not something to which Zin is indifferent. A lot of his charm has to do with a certain

Installation view of Zin Taylor’s “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” 2014 Courtesy JessiCa Bradley Gallery

photo toNi hafkeNsCheid

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North American lack of pretension that might just be one of the last things Europeans find cool about America. He’s either smart enough, or confident enough, or shy enough (or all-three-at-once enough), to let coolness come to him. And so, of course, it does. The apartment that he and his partner found would be an example.

It’s very cool. And that’s one of the things that’s cool about Saint-Gilles: the view from the apartment is one that is within the rental price range of a young artist from Calgary and a young former music editor who is part Italian, part Belgian, and works for an independent art-book publisher. Affordability is one of the first reasons that artists are moving to Brussels from cities such as Paris and Berlin. But the second is what’s really cool: they come because artists are moving there.

But here’s the thing. The apartment’s principal view is not a bohemian vista of rooftops and chimneys. (That’s the view from the back of the apart-ment.) The bedroom window overlooks the building in front of which the Monday market happens.

Saint-Gilles town hall was a late outbreak of French Renaissance gran-diosity that, undoubtedly, drove the city’s burgeoning modernists mental when it was completed in 1904. It speaks to Belgium’s staid, historic regard for the bureaucracies on which municipal order depends—a middle-class proclivity that makes you realize why Karl Marx had the bourgeoisie on his mind so much when he lived here. Jacques Brel couldn’t get out of town fast enough.

But much as the town hall’s architecture proclaims otherwise, Belgian stereotypes are not in evidence at the Monday market. There are no dip-lomats in suits. There are no idling Citroëns. There are no complacent-looking burghers, humourlessly precise administrators and overbearing, well-pensioned civil servants. Nobody in the square looks like they spend their days toiling over trade agreements in the bowels of the European Council or comparing debt ratios at the Central Bank. The crowd that gathers for the Monday market is one of those hodgepodges of youth and age, affluence and poverty, student and professional, dreamer and charla-tan, artist and truck-driver, shopkeeper and hipster that a big city can produce at whatever street corners and empty parking lots the corporations have somehow missed. It’s the kind of place Zin is not in the least hesitant to say he likes a lot.

The casual urbanity of the crowd combines with the grey dignity of a European city, the flavours and smells of some amazingly good street food, and the existence of perfectly reasonable drinking laws to remind a visitor from North America that, well, he is a visitor from North America.

We are standing in a circle of Zin’s friends, drinking wine as the smoke from the various nearby grills drifts between us. Dusk has fallen. The strings of electric lights make the square feel a little magical, like a fair-ground after sunset.

Zin was born in Calgary in 1978. His parents split up when he was young and he was raised by a hardworking, independently minded woman who eventually remarried. Money was never in great abundance, and the part-time jobs that were a part of his early life are biographical details of which he is quite proud. No trust fund helped him along the path of becoming an artist, although his mother was always encouraging. He attended art school in Calgary, and he applied the same straightforward motivation in moving from Calgary to Toronto in 2001 as he later would when he moved

to Europe seven years later. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” he says. “You go back.”

But the worst thing hasn’t happened. Berlin, Brussels, Basel, Vienna, New York and Toronto have become spokes on the hub of Zin’s Brussels. And it’s true: what he wanted to be, he is.

He has become what curator Dieter Roelstraete once described as an artist “known internationally for his elaborate installations encompassing elements of performance and sculpture along with drawing, printing, and video. Narration is an essential ingredient of much of Taylor’s multi-faceted work, and his stories are often culled from the undergrowth of popular culture (more specifically underground music scenes) and contemporary art lore...Journalism, research, storytelling: not surprisingly, both the spoken word and the printed word figure prominently in Taylor’s practice (the art-ist himself belonging to a generation of practitioners for whom a definite facility with language, both on a theoretical and literary level, has become a key aspect of artistic identity), and many of his installations have also been accompanied by publications and/or artist books.”

This is useful and relevant information—and it spreads from the web of social media and multi-platform websites exactly as it is intended to. But what is actually really useful to know about Zin is how methodical and carefully plotted a self-creation he is. For one thing: his facility with language was hard earned. He speaks in public. He enjoys writing. But he taught himself to write by imitating others. And he learned to speak without dreadful, soul-destroying consternation after six years of speech therapy when he was a child. He stutters. The fissures in vocal narrative still open up suddenly before him.

His friends and fellow artists probably don’t know this about him. I don’t realize it myself until he tells me. He’s built a laconic, unhurried pause so successfully into his personality that it is now just part of who he is. But when I play back the recording of our conversation I realize how skilfully he rebounds from and circles around the sounds that give him difficulty. I realize how much he is always thinking ahead.

It is only later, while flying back to Toronto and listening to our inter-views that I find myself wondering if the chasms of speech over which he has learned to jump are the same chasms of formlessness for which he seeks to find form. I wonder if the experience of stepping into Jessica Bradley Gallery last winter and seeing the mysterious dangling mobiles of “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” so confidently claiming the space was something like glimpsing the new language that emerges when the old breaks down.

At the Monday market, the friends he introduces me to are artists and curators from Cairo, New Zealand and France. There is a composer who has just arrived from San Francisco. There is a dancer from New York. The conversations—both ours and those in the crowded square around us—are pitched at good cocktail-hour volumes.

Zin seems happy. He seems perfectly at home.“I didn’t expect this,” I say.“Nobody does,” he answers. And there’s something about the way he

smiles, the way he refills our glasses with the wine bottle in his other hand, and about the little toast he gives me that makes me realize he is talking about more than Brussels. Not only does he live somewhere nobody expects. Somewhere nobody expects is also where his work is. ■

Zin Taylor 24 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots made into forms and arranged upon a vitrine made of brass and glass 2012 Brass, glass,

MDF, paint, plaster, clay and papier-mâché 1.6 m x 50 cm x 50 cm Courtesy

JessiCa Bradley Gallery

photo toNi hafkeNsCheid

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ZIN TAYLOR | THE TANGENTALZIGZAG / Kunstraum, London

ZIGZAG   /   SOLID   FOAM   –   THOUGHT   A   THROWING   SHAPES,   INK,   PAPER,   PHOTOGRAPH,   70   X   50   CM,2014 ,   COURTESY   OF   KUNSTRAUM

ATPdiary continua la rubrica EXPANDED dedicata ad artisti, gallerie,

A r t i s t ( s ) : Z i n T a y l o r

loro significati. Alcune proposte includeranno le future conferenze cheattraverseranno Settembre in cui momenti performativi, screenings ediscussioni amplieranno il concetto di Morphologies. In Ottobre, l’artistafiamminga Nicoline van Harskamp produrrà una performance e unamostra all’interno del suo progetto Englishes. All’inizio del nuovo annola serie si concluderà con una mostra collettiva internazionale.

(Intervista di Marta Ravasi)

A   D IAGRAM,   INK,   PAPER,   PHOTOGRAPH,   70   X   50   CM,   2014 ,   COURTESY   OF   KUNSTRAUM

ATPdiary continues EXPANDED, the section dedicated to artists,galleries, museums and projects in the main art capitals of the world.

ATP: The work The Hiss of a Snake, the Sound of a Form, introducesus to the exhibition at the entrance of the space, how do you considerthe figure of the snake in relation to this body of work?

ZT: I’ll give you a list:- A snake is a form that moves, thinks, eats, sleeps, lives and dies.- A snake sheds its surface, regularly.- The surface of snake skin is composed of interlocking zigzags (kindof…).- A snake travels in the form of a zigzag, a tangental movement of backand forth.- The hiss of a snake, the SSSSSSSSS, when written with the aid of alittle graphic abstraction becomes VVVVVVVVV, a zigzag.- In other words, the snake seemed an obvious choice to represent thezigzag idea, the proposal of that pattern. A snake is real, it’s a fact thatlives – a living agent of organic pattern.

ATP: Alongside the works on paper you occupy the space withfurniture-like elements, what was your intention within this choice?

ZT: Kunstraum needed a new table, and the exhibition needed anelevated surface for display. I’d like to think that what came about wasan economical response to a perceived problem. A rather simplerelationship, but one that allowed for an additional elaboration of thezigzag designation of locating negotiation within a form. In simplifiedterms, a table (or a desk) operates as a site where work, thought, andnegotiation takes place, either literally with a person or persons sittingthere, or, figuratively through the addition of ‘things’ occupying itssurface. Within the exhibition, the zig of one table is countered by thezag of another. One is for administrative work relative to the dailyoperation of Kunstraum, whereas the other is located within theexhibition, serving as a display space for one of the three snake lampsto perch upon. I saw these dual uses, the back-and-forth nature of thezigzag, repeated within the administrative/exhibition duality of thespace.

ATP: After Stripes and Dots and the recent zigzag how do you thinkyou work will progress? In which direction do you think the nextevolution will be?

ZT: My program, as it were, is to develop thoughts about a subject intoforms about a subject. Luckily, this takes shape in a myriad of ways. Inother words, I plan to keep thinking about whatever it is that’s around

me. The patterns I’ve used are tools of comprehension, the surface of athing has an uncanny way of delivering an idea. A typical sculpturalrelationship is that the exterior of a form is the result of an interiorlogic. This simple relationship is a staging ground of thought where thebinary of inside/outside can be re-deployed, examined, andinstrumentalized to introduce alternatives, abstraction – what I at timesrefer to as ‘difference’ – for an appropriated subject. Speaking aboutideas, something esoteric, complex, fragmented, can be deliveredutilizing a rather simple device of familiarity – the known assists incomprehending an unknown. It’s this relationship that I continue towork with – in other words, thoughts about a subject, turned intoforms about a subject.

One question to Thomas Cuckle:

ATP: Could you explain the idea of his project Morphologies and whatthe program is going to develop?

Thomas Cuckle: “Zin Taylor: The Tangental Zigzag” is the first chapterof Morphologies, a season of exhibitions and events centred aroundartistic imagination of language formation. ‘Morphology’ is the study ofstructures and forms, ranging from the structure of words to the shapeof astronomical objects or biological organisms. I like the idea that thestructure of galaxies and the structure of sentences are understood inthe same terms. So Morphologies considers a parallel between thecreation of objects, artworks and images on the one hand, and theconstructs of language on the other. To understand the way somethingis now implies knowing how it got there and where it is going –languages, galaxies, rivers, and artworks, all of them are in constantflux. In that sense Zin Taylor’s exhibition has been the perfect place tostart Morphologies; for Zin the works in the exhibition are proposals,they are things on their way somewhere.

The idea of a morphology is nebulous, it is the study of form ingeneral. In the same way the Morphologies project seeks to take theseideas of language formation and expand on them, to see some of thepossibilities of what they can mean. Some of the outcomes will includethe upcoming ‘conference’ throughout September in which we usemoments of performance, screenings and discussions to expand on theconcept of Morphologies. Then in October Dutch artist Nicoline vanHarskamp will be producing a major performance work and anexhibition from her Englishes project. Then early next yearMorphologies will conclude with an international group exhibition.

Zin Taylor (b. 1978 in Calgary, Canada) lives and works in Brussels.Recent solo exhibitions include: Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, CA(2014); Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, CA; Fogo Island Arts,CA; Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, DK; Supportico Lopez, Berlin, DE (all2013); La Loge, Brussels, BE; and MuHKA, Antwerp, BE (both 2012).Group shows include: CGP, London, UK; Frac Ile-de-France / LePlateau, Paris, FR (both 2014); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, CA;Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna,AT (all 2013); and Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, US (2012). ZinTaylor is represented by Supportico Lopez, Berlin and Jessica BradleyGallery, Toronto.

(Interview by Marta Ravasi)

BAR   OF   THE   LAVANDER   HAND ,   INK,   PAPER,   PHOTOGRAPH,   70   X   50   CM,   2014 ,   COURTESY   OFKUNSTRAUM

BZZZZ,   SAID   ZIGZAG,   IN   THE   PRESENCE   OF   SOLID   FOAM,   INK,   PAPER,   PHOTOGRAPH,   70   X   50   CM,2014 ,   COURTESY   OF   KUNSTRAUM

SEGMENTS   AND   SURFACES   (MIAMI   IGUANA),   INK,   PAPER,   PHOTOGRAPH,   70   X   50   CM,   2014 ,COURTESY   OF   KUNSTRAUM

© 2 0 1 4 ART   *   TEXTS   *   PICS . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r ve d .

by AILEEN BURNS AND JOHAN LUNDH March 11, 2014

Zin Taylor’s “The Story of Stripesand Dots (Chapter 7)”JESSICA BRADLEY GALLERY, Toronto

February 20–March 22, 2014

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“This is a dot. A dot is a sound. A dot is a sound in space. This is a dot in space…”This is the voiceover, augmented with psychedelic tonal music, which emanatesfrom a speaker casually draped with hand-painted fabrics reminiscent of anAmerican flag. The sonically infused gallery space is populated with paintings,drawings, photos, and sculptures by Canadian artist Zin Taylor—with each andevery one of them featuring black-and-white stripes and dots. Based in Brusselsfor nearly a decade, Taylor has been gaining an increasing internationalreputation with exhibitions across Europe and North America. “The Story ofStripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” is now his fourth exhibition at Toronto’s JessicaBradley Gallery, and is the latest in a series of shows in which he sets out toexplore the cornerstones of both abstraction and figuration.

Taylor’s visual vocabulary is intentionally limited to black-and-white stripes anddots; however, it is the syntactical play of these elements in disparate contextsthat energize his work. In contrast to the work of the modernist masters thatcomes to mind when one thinks of philosophies and hypotheses of abstraction—like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, or Josef Albers, who each believed thattheir experiments in fields of color could be the foundation for a new society—Taylor’s inquiry into stripes and dots offers a lens for altering our perception ofthe world around us in a sprawling and seemingly endless play of associations,tangents, and hypotheses. In his work, we see that the line is the contour used todefine a form, and the dot a point of pure pigment loaded with the potential toremain abstract or to become—even extend into—a line itself. These graphicelements allow him to filter perceptions through a set of identifiable symbols, andin turn, to render his ideas in sculptural form.

Modernist purity is also not Taylor’s primary interest. Instead, he describes lines(stripes in Taylor’s vocabulary) as stories—extending into time and space—andthe dots as events—moments of action or expression—in an otherwise lineartrajectory. One sees this quite clearly in A Structure Choreographed to Filter aRoom (Fingers Pulled from the Sea and Patterned), 2nd arrangement, (2012), athree-part mobile hanging in the main gallery space’s entrance; its black-and-white stripes and dots introduce a key visual thread that runs throughout theentire exhibition. Bringing to mind the most famous of modernist mobile-makers, Alexander Calder—who once created an alphabetical index for shapes inhis hanging sculptures so that they could be read(1)—the work consists of twolong, serpentine sculptures made of PVC, plaster, and acrylic paint that twirl ontheir wires alongside a single, striped ball. Confronting us like a curtain at theentry to the space, these hanging sculptures not only assume the shape of twosquiggly lines and a dot, but their surfaces are also painted with those patterns.Serving as a three-dimensional introduction to Taylor’s formal approach, theirshape suggests the stylized representation of a snake hung by a leopard tail. Hungindividually, these works, unlike Calder’s mobiles, are less concerned with theirown gravity than with their relationship to the things around them.

Late German artist Martin Kippenberger has been a recurrent influence onTaylor. Both artists work is somewhat messy and at times libidinous (with linesand dots suggesting, for Taylor, the phallus and vulva). Indeed, Kippenberger’sown Metro-Net subway station in Canada’s Dawson City was the main subject ofone of Taylor’s early video works, Put Your Eye In Your Mouth (2007) as well asNook (2007), his photographic and text-based travelogue to the Metro-Netproject. Here in this new installation, Taylor uses a symbolic system to interpretand see many everyday shapes and forms anew. Running along one of thegallery’s walls is Letterhead of Stripes and Dots (2013), a series of doodle-likedrawings that have been folded into thirds and reopened like a letter. Reading asif they are part of a private conversation to which we are only partially privy,these Kippenberger-esque pen drawings offer an amusing means of encounteringstripes and dots in everyday life, like seeing sushi as dots or looking at the stripesof zebras.

1 View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014.

2 Zin Taylor, A Structure Choreographed to Filter a Room(Fingers Pulled from the Sea and Patterned), 2ndarrangement, 2012.

3 View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014.

4 Zin Taylor, An Origin for Stripes and Dots (Dalmatian Suit),2012.

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While the time for grand narratives such as “modernity” or “progress” may beover, it is through storytelling that we articulate our interpersonal relationships,justify pasts, and speculate about the future. Taylor’s exhibitions, or “chapters,”as he calls them, make use of a range of narrative conventions and devices, likevoiceovers, recurrent characters (a Dalmation, or a tabby cat, for example), andprops, which sit patiently in anticipation of action. The overarching or linearstory is difficult, if not impossible, to fully grasp. Instead of offering a tale with abeginning, middle, and end, Taylor engages our imagination through processes ofabstraction and speculation. Previous editions of “The Story of Stripes and Dots”have been presented in museums, public galleries, art fairs, and commercialgalleries, and these different contexts inevitably alter the legibility of these storiesand artworks —a quality not dissimilar to another artist synonymous with stripes:French postwar artist Daniel Buren.

Although the exhibition as a whole does not provide us with a coherent narrative—at least not a grand one, if any at all—and it might be tempting to view Taylor’sundertaking as simply derivative, it is the combination of all the objects in hisinstallations, and the interweaving of idiosyncratic observations, that beckons tous. Guided as we were by the voice calling from the main gallery space on our wayinto the exhibition—it was easy for us to overlook a vitrine in a small room withthe self-explanatory title, 24 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots made into formsand arranged upon a vitrine made of brass and glass (2012). But upon leavingthe exhibition, it became clear that this work is the key to understanding theentire project’s narrative potential. Amongst those twenty-four objects on vieware small jars, a small skull-like mask, a serpentine sculpture (much like thelonger elements of the aforementioned mobile), a spotted wooden cat with astripy tail, and many other curious objects, some of which are much harder toidentify. Serving like a preface to the main exhibition, this “micro-narrative”looks like a stylized version of something you might find at an apothecary shop,where the performative and mystical side of Taylor’s enterprise comes to the fore.Much like other artists of his generation, including Laure Prouvost or MarvinGaye Chetwynd (formerly known as Spartacus Chetwynd), the references toaesthetic traditions and their supporting theories and figures abound in hispractice—including Dadaist collage, Surrealist performance, Minimalist painting;it is in Taylor’s unpredictable approach to strategies of appropriation and homagethat his work comes to life.

1) Writer Zoë Gray makes this connection in a recent publication on Taylor’swork. Zoë Gray, “Fold Along the Dotted Line,” in Zin Taylor: LichenVoices/Stripes and Dots, eds. Rosemary Heather and Nicolaus Schafhausen(Berlin: Fogo Island Arts and Sternberg Press, 2013), 68.

Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh are Directors/Curators of the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane,Australia.

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5 Zin Taylor, An Origin for Stripes and Dots (The Lines of thisTree Speak Bubbles), 2012.

6 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots, 2013.

7 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots (detail), 2013.

8 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots (detail), 2013.

9 Zin Taylor, 24 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots made intoforms and arranged upon a vitrine made of brass and glass,2012.

10 (Left) Zin Taylor, Talking Panel (Horizontals and Verticals#15), 2013. (Right) Zin Taylor, A Structure for Language ontoan Organic Form #17, 2011.

11 (Foreground) Zin Taylor, Speaker, 2014. (Wall) Zin Taylor,Talking Panel (Horizontals and Verticals #12), 2013.

1 View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014. All imagescourtesy of Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto.

2 Zin Taylor, A Structure Choreographed to Filter a Room(Fingers Pulled from the Sea and Patterned), 2ndarrangement, 2012. Plaster, CPVC, and acrylic paint,dimensions variable, overall width 119.4 cm.

3 View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014.

4 Zin Taylor, An Origin for Stripes and Dots (Dalmatian Suit),2012. Fabric, acrylic paint, and graphite on paper, 73.4 x 52.7cm framed.

5 Zin Taylor, An Origin for Stripes and Dots (The Lines of thisTree Speak Bubbles), 2012. Fabric, acrylic paint, andgraphite on paper, 67.9 x 53.1 cm framed.

6 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots, 2013. Ink onpaper, 20 parts, 29.8 x 21.3 cm each, framed.

7 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots (detail), 2013. Inkon paper, 20 parts, 29.8 x 21.3 cm each, framed.

8 Zin Taylor, Letterhead of Stripes and Dots (detail), 2013. Inkon paper, 20 parts, 29.8 x 21.3 cm each, framed.

9 Zin Taylor, 24 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots made intoforms and arranged upon a vitrine made of brass and glass,2012. Brass, glass, MDF, paint, plaster, clay, and papier-mâché, base and frame 160 x 50 x 50 cm, total height 155cm.

10View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014. (Left) Zin Taylor,Talking Panel (Horizontals and Verticals #15), 2013. MDF,acrylic paint, and brass, double-sided, 70.9 x 50.2 cm. (Right)Zin Taylor, A Structure for Language onto an Organic Form#17, 2011. Photograph, 47.6 x 38.7 cm.

11View of Zin Taylor, “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter7),” Jessica Bradley Gallery, Toronto, 2014. (Foreground) ZinTaylor, Speaker, 2014. Wood, cotton, paint, audio speakers,and MP3 player, 108 x 61 x 52.7 cm, and audio track, 15:00minutes. (Wall) Zin Taylor, Talking Panel (Horizontals andVerticals #12), 2013. MDF, acrylic paint, and brass, double-sided, 51.4 x 40 cm.

Whitney Biennial 2014WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, New York

“how to write III | artists read theirtexts”GALERIE WIEN LUKATSCH, Berlin

Zarina’s “Folding House”GALLERY ESPACE, New Delhi

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March 19, 2013

RODNEY LATOURELLEZIN TAYLOR AT SUPPORTICO LOPEZ IN BERLIN

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There always seems to be a dose of irony in Zin Taylor's eccentric and eclectic production. Often taking the form ofcrude handmade constructions, his work can be viewed as stand-ins or mock-ups for traditional museum-based art.For his second exhibition at Supportico Lopez, this roaming Canadian artist exhibits a sound piece, a mobile, and aseries of paintings – it's like a model of an exhibition.

Zin Taylor

Stylistically, the mobile and the painting are characteristic of Taylor's elegantly evoked sense of accretion, of formsthat incorporate their own process of production: in effect narrating their own formation even as they formally evokeorganic shapes. But what are they saying? The sound piece that emanates from an unseen source is key: a voice istelling a story. The narrative is a straight spoken psycho-archeology of Taylor's coming of age in terms of bands andrelated "underground" music and 'zine scenes. This is a story that many (western) teenagers must identify with –defining yourself with music and style as you learn about the layers of culture around you, searching for affinities andalternatives within/against a commercially driven pop media sphere. The text is in fact a personal and chronologicalaccount of the ways in which an individual can interact with larger political, socio-cultural structures in society from amarginal position. Similarly, in Taylor's work there is a metaphorical evocation of larger issues, like when you pick upa random object to use as an example to explain a more complex idea. The tablet, foolscap format of his paintingsevokes a worked-over writing surface and bears abstract vestiges or preliminaries of forms that recalls a copy-paste,'zine aesthetic. The mobile balances a series of eyeballs on one side of a spectral beam with black and white formson the other and acts in one sense as a cipher for the act of looking that is translated into language – a model ofcommunication. Combined with the paintings and mobile, the matter-of-fact earnestness of the text and the voiceitself construct a push-pull effect across the whole of the exhibition. The cartoon-like gestures in the space acquire anurgency; the flippant becomes fragile and the ironic heartfelt – condensing a bittersweet atmosphere, revealing areckoning.

Supportico Lopez: http://www.supporticolopez.com/Zin Taylor: Parrot Soup continues until April 13.

Rodney LaTourelle lives and works in Berlin as an artist, designer, and writer. His writing on art and architecture hasbeen published in numerous periodicals and artist catalogues. His installations have been exhibited internationallyand his work is included in collections such as the National Gallery of Canada and Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-DucJean, Luxembourg. He is Akimblog's Berlin correspondent and can be followed @RoddyLT.

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Zin Taylor’s latest exhibition, titled “The Units,” examines how he approaches information as a material

to produce “units” of thought. Presenting work from the past six years, the show is on view at the

Ursula Blickle Stiftung, a private foundation in southern Germany, until July 10.

I USE THE TERM UNITS to describe the translation of ideas about a subject into a form about a

subject. Units are what exist in physical space after the thinking and abstracting settles into shape.

They are a way of handling information. The insinuation is that a thing, like a narrative, is made of

many units—like how letters are used to produce words, words are used to produce a sentence, and

then a statement.

Within the three floors of the show, I visually “talk” about a garden, a street corner in Antwerp, an

underground tunnel in Scotland, knives, hands, and a derelict bakery––relatively public subjects,

nothing too rarified. My responses translated into a series of sculptural forms––examples of a working

language displayed in space. Throughout the hallways and in the staircase there are drawings,

photographs, and small objects that suggest a structural origin for the individual works contained within

each of the five rooms. They are rules yet to inherit a subject, and they are floating––like a ghost in a

room. It’s as if these smaller, more formal works, are watching their larger cousins installed within the

spaces, observing what they will eventually grow into. I like to think about growth as describing the

additive qualities that occur when a subject is addressed with intent. It’s what happens as the by-

product of intentionality, a kind of phenomenological authorship. Address a subject, and that subject

grows. It takes up more space, occupies new areas, speaks to things it didn’t before.

On the third floor of the building, a lofty attic houses the central work for this show, an artist’s book

titled Growth. Published by Sternberg Press and the Ursula Blickle Stiftung, and designed by Boy

Vereecken of Slavs and Tatars, the book consists of writings by Dan Adler, Dieter Roelstraete,

Esperanza Rosales, Mark von Schlegell, and myself, independently addressing growth in a way relative

to what this term could mean. Five types of narrative writing are employed: art-historical analysis,

philosophic prose, narrative nonfiction, science fiction, and abstract whimsy. The Stiftung typically

produces a catalogue for each of the four exhibitions it mounts per year. I felt that to make a catalogue

at this point would be akin to producing a tombstone for myself, with texts eulogizing what I had done. I

wanted to produce a book that could potentially do something, which someone would want to read

regardless of who it was about––a book where the intention is a projection forward, not a recount of

the past. The book just “is,” the way many of my other sources just “are.” There are no rules to follow

here. It’s a book of material, designed to be material, to be used, consumed, et cetera . . . it’s a unit.

— As told to Lauren O’Neill-Butler

Zin Taylor06.06.11

Left: Cover of Zin Taylor’s Growth (2011). Right: A spread from Growth.

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Mousse Magazine, Issue #27, Feb – Mar, 2011

TAYLOR MADE

ZIN TAYLOR AND THE STORY OF FORM

by Dieter Roelstraete The art world is flooded with printed matter, a bottomless hunger for paper that Dieter Roelstraete finds an opportunity to analyze in relation to the work of Zin Taylor, undoubtedly an exquisite narrator. His stories often focus on anecdotes from art history and are patiently excavated, “unearthed”, even literally entering the underground realm...

Zin Taylor, Booklet for The Allegorical Function of Dirt: a discussion with Aki Tsuyuko’s Ongakushitsu, 2005 Courtesy: Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto and Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels Why are so many young artists interested in storytelling? Why am I, when visiting the art schools of the world, so often asked, in this day and age, to read or listen to work rather than merely look at it? And this, typically, in studios that are cluttered with books and

photocopied texts first and foremost, old school art “objects” often a distant second? Why are so many artists writing, and interested in writing? Why etc. – many more questions much like the above could be asked still, and perhaps they shouldn’t. After all, artists may well constitute the last truly dependable consumer constituency for that exact type of specialty writing or publishing which the undersigned, among many others, engages in. Indeed, while the mainstream press (that is to say, by and large, the printed word) is continually awash in apocalyptic tidings about the end of print – and they are probably right too – the art world appears consumed, paradoxically (or not), by an unquenchable thirst for printed matter, and the subject of this essay, Brussels-based Canadian artist Zin Taylor, is not notably different in this regard, as the ever-expanding catalogue of Zin Taylor-made artist books seems to attest. Now anyone who raises the kind of questions like those raised above, must also, even if only rhetorically, attempt an answer of some kind, and my suggestion for such an answer would probably involve the following elements: 1) the increased demand for literacy (both “literary” and theoretical) that has become an essential ingredient of art education; 2) the distinct aura of anachronism and obsolescence that is starting to surround the art of book-making; 3) the artist’s typical instinct to come to the rescue of precisely those cultural phenomena that are becoming increasingly marginalized and threatened with disappearance. Somewhat related to this impulse is the intertwined issue of 4) the hypertrophy of image production in our current cultural climate – which has led to a devaluation of the image that the artist, historically attached to a tradition of “good” images, does not want to be a part of (“the piece need not be built”, in Lawrence Weiner’s famous formulation) – and 5) the specter of cultural amnesia that hovers above this hypertrophic cult of the ever-accelerating, -expanding and -proliferating image world. The forgetting of language that is implied in this vertiginous regime of ocular overload (the more we see, the less we speak; the more we see, the less we remember) is also, inevitably, a forgetting of history, and a forgetting of the many stories that constitute the patchwork of history. Hence (perhaps): storytelling in art.

Zin Taylor,(Hook Nose), 2010 Courtesy: Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels

Zin Taylor certainly is a storyteller, and the narrative impulse (not a mere “turn”, this time) is a driving force behind much of his work; many of his artistic projects either involve extensive narration, often told in the artist’s own voice, or the publication of these narratives in book form. In a number of cases, these stories have touched upon certain minutiae of recent art history – this does not, however, make Taylor into your typical “referentiality” artist, nor is he overly concerned with the politics of re-enactment – such as Martin Kippenberger’s abandoned metro station in the Yukon or Marcel Broodthaers’ eagle fixation. In Put Your Eye In Your Mouth: A Conversational Documentary Recording Martin Kippenberger’s Metro-Net Station in Dawson City, Yukon (the literary character of Taylor’s work is also apparent in his love of elaborate titles: it is hard to imagine any of his works being named Untitled), a work in part inspired by the artist’s conversations with the man who paid for and built the eponymous metro station, Taylor set out to uncover what little remains of the Northern Canadian site of Kippenberger’s worldwide metro network. The resulting video (and accompanying publication, simply titled Nook) is as much an irreverent, quick-fingered fiction as an On The Road-style documentary – an obfuscation befitting the notoriously megalomaniacal subject of this homage. Made in 2008, just after Taylor moved to Belgium to take up permanent residence there, The Crystal Ship is a video/publication diptych much like the previous work, “a journalistic narrative that approaches the visual working practice of Marcel Broodthaers as a contextual frame to interpret a series of landmarks within an Antwerp neighborhood”, as the artist has put it. The work also involves a set of small, unassuming clay sculptures, one depicting an eagle (Broodthaers’ totem animal, of course, this one modeled on an actual statue in Antwerp’s museum quarter), another a scale model of the façade of the house in Antwerp that was once home to the legendary gallery A379089 (directed, for six months of its all too short-lived existence, by none other than Kasper König), in the garden of which Broodthaers recorded his famous writing-degree-zero performance La Pluie (1969) – this garden in turn becoming the site where Taylor would present, performance-like, the various findings of his idiosyncratic research into this (naturally unknown) subterranean local art history. The speleological metaphor of the artist patiently, if a little manically, burrowing to uncover and unearth truly underground (art) histories is not innocently chosen here, and nowhere has Taylor’s interest in a literalized practice of excavation been expressed more clearly as in The Flute of Sub, an ensemble of works – true to the D.I.Y. total-work-of-art spirit of Kippenberger and the like, Taylor also designs posters or series of posters to accompany his videos – the

central sculptural element of which is a flute made out of plastic and whose irregular, crooked form is modeled after the shape of one nexus in a subterranean system of tunnels the artist happened upon while sojourning in the Scottish Highlands (this piece was included in an exhibition I curated at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung in 2009 titled The Archaeologists, for which Taylor also designed the poster). The video, which really functions as an allegorical reflection upon the inscrutable mysteries of “form”, recounts the artist’s discovery of these mysterious man-made tunnels, while every screening of it has been introduced in the past by an actual flute recital – performed by Taylor himself, needless to say, the flute’s material and shape being such that it cannot be played by the uninitiated. As such, the work also exemplifies Taylor’s strong reliance on musical culture, often the more obscure (“underground”) the better – “psych folk” in The Flute of Sub, droning “witch folk” in White Pearl Sunshine Summoning Charm (2007), eccentric Jap noise in The Allegorical Function of Dirt: A Discussion with Aki Tsuyuko’s Ongakushitsu (2005), and abstract grindcore in The Locust (2004).

Zin Taylor, Growth on a Form (Z), 2010 Courtesy: Galerie VidalCuglietta, Brussels

If The Flute of Sub essentially revolved around the inscrutable mysteries of “form” while still appearing to be something other, then the question of growth, of the organic, only mildly artist-assisted development of form, has recently come to occupy center stage in Taylor’s work in a much more direct, bare-bones fashion, and works such as The Bakery of Blok and the appositely titled Organisms (a series of color photographs of kneaded bits of dough) and Growth on a Form (a series of drawings of “imagined wood forms that have become overrun with an ooze-like material”) signal a definite shift towards a fundamental interrogation of sculpture’s basic language, if not of the very assumptions that underlie the enterprise of sculpture and art as

such. How do forms come about? Do materials have a will of their own, content to speak through Zin Taylor’s hands as long as he’s able to give voice to matter’s inner thought? In The Bakery of Blok (which again consists of a video as well as a series of wooden sculptures, crude replicas of the tools of the baking trade), the art of baking bread is held up as an idiomatic metaphor for the art of giving sensuous shape to thinking – the art of art, in short. Here, we are returning to an origin of sorts – heading for the fundamentals. Indeed, carpentry and the multiplication of breads: where have we heard that story before?

Zin Taylor, Booklet for The Allegorical Function of Dirt: a discussion with Aki Tsuyuko’s

Ongakushitsu, 2005 Courtesy: Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto and Galerie

VidalCuglietta, Brussels.

Zin Taylor MIGUEL ABREU GALLERY 36 Orchard Street, June 25–August 2 The title of Zin Taylor’s meditative new exhibition, “The Bakery of Blok and the Three Forms of Unit,” aptly recalls the close-knit metaphysical fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges, Taylor is particularly adept at compressing elaborate speculative problems into compact, metaphoric structures. Here, Taylor has created a series of multimedia installations that reinvigorate the seemingly outmoded question of form by approaching it not as a primarily aesthetic issue but as a philosophical conundrum. At the heart of the exhibition is a series of wooden sculptures that suggest the paraphernalia of bread making—tools, measures, weights, and containers—but that are inexactly executed from unillustrated instructional texts on baking. These sculptures short-circuit the standard hierarchy of craft production: Whereas one normally imagines the artist imparting a distinct form to passive materials, here the relationship between maker, tool, concept, and object becomes highly ambiguous. This collapse of traditional categories is dramatically ramified in Taylor’s appealing stop-motion videos, wherein the physical and conceptual “ingredients” of the exhibition––including globs of uncooked dough, loaves of baked bread, blocks of wood, and finished sculptural objects––enact an otherworldly, anthropomorphic pageant. Each of these videos serves as a space in which the standard distinctions between subject and object, organic and inorganic, raw and cooked, cease to work. Yet through the repetitive, nearly modular installation of the works, Taylor seems to admit, somewhat equivocally, that his deconstructive approach to the object must ultimately be inscribed within the inescapable logic of the contemporary commodity.

— Michael Paulson

Zin Taylor, The Bakery of Block and the Three Forms of Unit (arrangement I), 2009, painted wood, framed photograph, video monitor, single-channel video, 86 x 79 x 79".

Zin Taylor Jessica Bradley Art + Projects 1450 Dundas Street West, Toronto ON March 10–April 7 “Who Named the Days?,” Zin Taylor’s first solo show at this gallery, features a single-channel video, a painted wooden sculpture, and a series of six graphite drawings called “Growth on a Form” (all works 2007). Each of the drawings depicts a central pedestal-like motif—seemingly constructed from found wood fragments—accompanied by crosshatched spherical forms with indefinite contours that suggest fluffy hair, dirt, dust bunnies, wool, or generalized filth. Given the severe lack of other imagery—or chromatic diversity—in these delicately rendered works, one is at times startled by their metaphoric and semantic complexity. In one image, the central wooden form resembles a post on which mud—or perhaps a more abject substance—has been wiped; in another, it is reminiscent of a gallows. Elsewhere, the structures serve a relatively artistic function, appearing to serve as backdrop or display surface. Another spherical image—of a large white ball—is featured in the video; it lies partially submerged in water within a wooded setting that may be a swamp or merely a puddle. This work, White Pearl Sunshine Summoning Charm, includes shots of the surrounding foliage basking in sunlight, the ball itself drifting slowly between trees, and abstract close-ups of its battered surface. The casual and idyllic charm of such imagery is complicated by an audio track of breathing and drumming—the incantation implied by the work’s title—that slowly builds in volume and intensity to include groaning and high-pitched moaning. This component encourages one to interpret the “pearl” within the ritualized context of a tribal culture, perhaps one with supernatural properties. Taylor shows here an impressive and consistent ability—in multiple media—to represent humble, found, and abstract objects in remarkably complex and resonant ways. —Dan Adler 03.19.07

White Pearl Sunshine Summoning Charm, 2007, still from a color video, 7 minutes.