Zin Taylor at Oakville Galleries

Artist: Zin Taylor

Exhibition title: Five Units of Haze

Venue: Oakville Galleries, Oakville, Canada

Date: September 25 – December 30, 2016

Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid, all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Oakville Galleries

Oakville Galleries is pleased to present Five Units of Haze, a solo exhibition of new work by Paris-based Canadian artist Zin Taylor.

Imagining the mind as a studio or factory, where hazy and nebulous thoughts grow into an abstract vocabulary of contour and curve, Zin Taylor’s work probes the spaces between object and idea, form and thought. Language is central to his practice, not as a means to explain, communicate or inform, but rather to speculate, negotiate and discuss.

For his exhibition at Oakville Galleries in Gairloch Gardens, the artist employs familiar visual cues to continue these investigations. The exhibition brings together several separate bodies of work or “units.” These include a grouping of sculptural “body-form” torsos that reference and invert the material language of Auguste Rodin; a mobile that draws inspiration from the alphabet-like hanging structures of Alexander Calder; and a wall drawing that stretches throughout the gallery. Providing an illustrative backdrop to the other works in the exhibition, these drawings use an abbreviated short form of representation to visualize and communicate ideas about human form in relation to objects in space.

Also included in the exhibition is a reference to the figure of the hippy, accompanied by a purpose-built sound system playing contemporary psychedelic music, a genre that has grown out of the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In referencing these subcultural touchstones, Taylor points to specific moments in which the intangible—sound, ideology, thought—finds articulation in aesthetic material and form.

Zin Taylor (1978, Calgary, Canada) is an artist based in Paris, France. He has presented solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America at institutions such as Portikus, Frankfurt; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, and MuKHA, Antwerp. He is represented by Supportico Lopez, Berlin.

Zin Taylor, Five Units of Haze, installation view, Oakville Gallerie, 2016