Taylor Anton White | Arrival / Departure

September 28 - November 9, 2024

Join K Contemporary and Taylor Anton White on Saturday, September 28, 2024 from 3 - 6 PM for an opening reception at K Contemporary, located at 1412 Wazee Street, Denver, CO.

Taylor Anton White’s exhibition thrusts viewers into the vaguely familiar, depositing them at the doorstep of the exaggerated and the absurd.  His show, an unaffected if sometimes oblique foray into the oddities of the human condition, chases his infatuation with the insipid. If human behavior is beset with anxiety and contradictions, White is preoccupied with aestheticizing them in blunt, unusual, and often humorous ways.

For example, his portraits of seemingly mundane desk chairs are stand-ins for human feeling and emotion. The webbing between the wheeled feet of each of his desk chairs reminds White of a spider, but also facilitates frenzied motion as the invisible occupant multitasks, twisting in one direction and then the next.  The artist’s blurred and redoubled contour lines capture the invisible sitter’s lines of movement and suggest a person hoisted out of their seat by the pneumatic mechanism that raises it up and down.  While White refrains from talking specifically about the content of his work, he gingerly references the anthropomorphic qualities of his frenetic objects – in this case the cosmically preposterous possibility of a “human soul” being ejected from a seat. This may be too heady a reading for White who eschews academic interpretations and dictating to viewers how to think.  He much prefers that his audience amble in the realm of ambiguity and raw feeling. 

Ultimately, White enjoys ridiculing himself alongside the art world – simplifying the human plight with pictures that straddle painting and drawing and allow platitudes to become possible punch lines.  He revels in the low brow with mark-making that comes as much from the gut as from calculation and paintings that suggest more than they tell. He explains, “I’ve been a super fan of stupidity for my whole life, impossibly drawn to irreverence. I’ve found that a deliberate childish or reckless approach to things can be a higher order skill set that leads to revelatory outcomes.” He continues, “I relish creating outlandish creative challenges for myself to push my practice further.” 

K Contemporary owner, Doug Kacena, adds, “It’s White’s attraction to screw-ups, failures, and fallacies that allow him to embrace and even taunt the basic idiocy and vagaries of everyday life. He gets right in there and wrestles with it by illustrating life’s risks with pictures of squished cars, leaning houses, bent forks, and buckling legs.”

As White frames it, “I pay attention to things I question or trust the least.”