Fraser Taylor Prints

Artists statement: Drawing is the meditative practice behind Fraser Taylor’s method, documenting the temporal space of emotion and the unforeseen. Done with ebullience, with repetition, and in large sequences, his drawings capture a detachment, a freedom from expectation and assumption. Taylor often moves his surfaces from floor to wall and back again. This continual shift in perspective imbues each piece with a unique spatial and temporal depth. Over time, the repetition of line and shape creates a subtle and intuitive aesthetic system that itself transgresses intellect. An explorative intimacy with various media – paint, ink, fabric, wire, tape, paper – allows Taylor to spontaneously interact with their physicality. His improvisational uses of various materials are the protean elements of his pictorial project. Using a particular figurative vocabulary and palette, he explores how the color black captures elusive emotions, tensions and shifts in weight, depth, and consequence. Taylor’s gestural marks, elliptically fragmented lines, and swollen masses press against the borders of each surface. In turn, these marks become further boundaries as they force the eye to redefine interiority and exteriority, to renegotiate scale and delineate positive and negative space. They set the terms for negotiation and possibility. The resultant shapes and spaces repeated in many of Taylor’s images evoke formal harmonies. Yet intrusions, protrusions, obfuscations, and fractures consistently rupture the viewer’s sense of order and expectation. Rejecting the self-evidence of visual stability and exploring the possibilities of communication, his images engage the violent and unsettled territories of unconscious desire. The cutting, splicing and reassembling of collage creates visual peculiarities that allude to a lifetime of displacement and transplantation. Through the grafting of eclectic materials and pigments, new planes of materiality and experience come to life. Indeed, Taylor’s complex surfaces solicit the viewer to experience the myriad textures of each piece, to step into the piece, to be consumed by its sensuality. His surfaces conjure the delicateness of cellular composition, the vastness of topographical vistas, and the intricacy of architectural infrastructures. They also evoke something dirty: the murky densities and openings of the body, the depths of psychic territories, the debris of human endeavor.