I’m proud to be part of the latest efforts by Juddy Roller, venerable Melbourne cafe and booming creative hub in my old home of Fitzroy. New Hunting Ground will open its doors on June 21, exposing Melbourne to a solid range of first-rate artist works from street to contemporary. Thanks to Shaun and the crew at Juddy for making this happen!
Hello hello! Just a quick update on a few of the things I have dipped my feet into over the past couple of weeks.
I was happy to contribute my piece ‘Bust’ to be exhibited in a small group show at FFDG in San Francisco, which opened this past Friday. I couldn’t be there, but my good friend Heather Tompkins was kind enough to scout it out and take a few snaps for me.
I also got a last minute opportunity to high tail it down to Miami for this year’s Art Basel, my first time participating in such an event. While there I was able to toss together a collaboration with friend, talented stencil artist and fellow Raleigh-dweller Mathew Curran in a carpark in the heavily saturated Wynwood Arts District. There are some snaps of the process on my Instagram. More photos to come.
Hello my friends. A lot of changes have been happening in the past several months and the life of Yours Truly has once again been thrown into moderate upheaval. Having spent two wonderful years in Australia and subsequently hitting a brick wall with immigration, I’ve decided to return home to the States for a time and orchestrate my next adventure.
Part of this change has involved phasing out my old website – which has stagnated for so long it’s starting to attract mosquitoes – and phasing in the brand new taylurk.com. I’m really excited as this will be the first fully streamlined web content system I’ve had since the advent of my internet presence in 2007. You can see updates of my work here and on my behance profile.
Below is the video from my solo show Base Nature which opened back in August to great success.
Base Nature Opening Night from Just Another Agency on Vimeo.
Thanks for following and I look forward to more exciting updates as things start to fall back into place!
xx Taylor
It’s been a few hard weeks but it’s all boiled down to this. Thursday night marks the opening of my solo exhibition at the new Just Another Project Space, featuring a brand new body of work and an original sound installation by Sophia Sin. I’m pumped.
Check the teaser below. I hope to see you there!
Base Nature by Taylor White Preview from Just Another Agency on Vimeo.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about experience and perception as it pertains to this precariously defined thing we call ‘reality.’ The self, the thing we call ‘I,’ is the fundamental enabler of experience, but it is a synthetic construct. The I is nothing without experience. The self emerges when we combine the experience of our present moment with the continuity of our existence. We interpret the present, filter it through a pile of previously acquired data, and from the result of this comparison we project outward an expectation of what will be.
If we consider consciousness as a river in constant flow through a static channel (say, the body,) then to say something IS – to ascribe permanent attributes to it – is to attempt to freeze the flow, to turn the river to ice; to trap a moment in time and perceive it as autonomous and enduring. When, in fact, that perception is merely an echo of something that only once, briefly, was. In the sense of ourselves, an ‘identity’ is but a spectral formation made up of past consciousness and future expectation. It is static electricity. It’s white noise.
It’s in our base nature to simplify things by packaging certain pieces of data and making ‘entities’ of them, and then to conclude that those entities are fixed in place. We have structured our comprehension such that every description of events in space involves the use of a rigid body to which those events have to be referred. This is language, this is math, this is science, this is philosophy. Were it not for these reference points, were we forced to perceive the world as a whirlwind of atoms that is never the same even for a fraction of a second, we would lose all notion of what is. The prospect is, at best, baffling; at worst, terrifying.
I think, though, that the creation of – and stringent adherence to – these reference points is directly related to the suffering we endure and that which we inflict on others. This is especially true when it comes to the ‘I,’ ‘Me,’ ‘Self.’ Our identity, our perceived status in life, is so deeply rooted that it constantly influences our interactions with others. The least slight to that image is unbearable, whereas the same qualifier applied to someone else would yield no reaction. If we have a strong image of ourselves, we are in constant search for fortification of that image by others, to see it universally recognized and accepted. Nothing is more painful than to see our self-image opened up to doubt, and indeed nothing is so capable of ruining a good time like the negative emotional choke hold such doubt will yield.
It is the disturbing emotions that will cloud and distort our perception of reality. The emotions make us believe that beauty or ugliness is inherent in people and things, even though it is the mind that decides whether things are attractive or repulsive. We are repelled by things that threaten our sense of self, and attracted to those that fortify it, but it is our mind – not innate attributes – that drive these attractions. We forge bonds and fight battles with people and objects as we perceive them to be, and it is our attachment to these perceptions that drag us further and further from reality and into the vicissitude of attraction and aversion that these mental imputations relentlessly perpetuate. From this, savage beasts are born.