New City Chicago

Zach Taylor: New Work  (multimedia)

The gallery website claims that Taylor possesses a “spontaneous, obsessive, and near pathological need to communicate his ideas in the medium best suited to express them.”  His fecundity is on ample display: sixty-four works total, with possibly more on the way.  While Taylor’s first solo exhibit at the gallery falls short on overall coherence, it’s fun lies in exploring the connections between pieces.  In one drawing, branches prop up a Trans Am holding a paint bucket.  A real branch props up a Corvette hood in the makeshift lean-to installation “The Spirit”; the bucket re-appears in “Tru-Test”, a paint ad turned upside-down and re-contextualized through the addition of Lichtenstein-esqe text.  The broken board in one painting echoes the sculpture “Mingus”, in which a paddle-shaped board is bent back into a threatening curve by a winch.  Many pieces indulge in 1950’s and 1960’s glamour; black marker cartoons drawn over pin-ups and assemblages that include a .38 magnum, a plywood Telecaster and anorange Eames chair.  Prominently displayed are twenty-four fashion ads transformed through a Polish papercutting technique, Wycinanki, into symmetrical mutant plant shapes; across the way cut-out letters spell-out “we’re fucked”.

A.D. Jameson

New City Chicago

Friday, October 26th, 2007

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CenterStage Chicago

Zach Taylor: New Work

Not Content to criticize material excess, Taylor idealizes a world where the detritus of everyday life is refashioned into “Something Useful”, a clever cascade of cheap, disposable Dollar Store finds molded into a sculptural tool.  He explores the tension between rebelling against and taking comfort in the capitalist impulse, most remarkably in a series of refashioned paint and collage print ads resembling something Norman Rockwell would have made on hallucinogens.

Justin Sondak

CenterStage Chicago

Tuesday, October 30th, 2007