Tommy Taylor
Shadowland
September 6 - October 27, 2012
Tommy Taylor
Shadowland
September 6 – October 27, 2012
Institute 193, Lexington
In Shadowland, Tommy Taylor has arranged imagery gleaned from cartoons, films, and found family photographs into compositions that convey the competing “drives, histories, expectations, and accepted social norms” that characterize modern identity.
Taylor’s paintings mine his own personal psychology in an attempt to illustrate how sexuality, religion, and nostalgia can exert contradictory influences on our inner lives. Like a lived experience, his work depicts feuding impulses that have nevertheless been formed into carefully composed arrangements.
For nearly a decade, Taylor’s work has been abstract; the figurative subject matter of these many-layered oil paintings mark a turning point in his art practice. He has, however, retained the careful attention to color and composition that characterized his earlier paintings, weaving each piece together with a network of swirling lines and geometric patterns.