ROSS TAYLOR MANOR WALKS 31 OCTOBER 18 NOVEMBER 2017 Mining a rich catalogue of fragmented recollections, s new body of work, Manor Walks, playfully interrogates notions of personal history and memory. References to childhood holiday spots, leisure centres, domestic scenes and the natural world meander from one work to the next: morphing, shifting, self-referencing and abstracting, all according to the process of remembering. In totality they read like a map, a string of mnemonically coded tableaux from which to decipher a personal narrative and probe the very nature of recollection and memorialising. As with memory, each work is intimately shaped by time. Firstly, there is the complex act of reminiscence, ever slipping between embellishment and reduction. Secondly, there is the freeze-framing of a moment and place into a representing scene. Then there is the process, uniquely evident in a determined labour of medium and the concentrated task of completing each image by simultaneously erasing white ground and filling the frame to the very edges. This last stage is perhaps the most revealing, as the apparent task of resolving each work is guided by the pursuit to acknowledge and renders the faint skeletal framework beneath all memory. As the works amble through time oscillating between Taylor s childhood spent in Northumberland, North East England and his current home in regional Victoria similarities and juxtapositions arise. Ancient formations in the landscape sit beside banal interior decorations and suburban trappings; deep geological time is influx with the prosaic preoccupations of contemporary domestic life. These accumulations, the very familiar building blocks of life experience, each contribute to a personal sense of place and identity. And here the tongue-in-cheek title, Manor Walks (the name of a shopping and leisure centre in his hometown in England) plays into Taylor s rendering of memory and individual history, referencing not an aristocratic upbringing or the haunting of a colonial past as it might suggest, but a life colored by local topography and domestic suburbia. Clare Needham SOPHIE GANNON GALLERY 2 Albert Street Richmond VIC 3121 Australia Telephone +613 9421 0857 info@sophiegannongallery.com.au www.sophiegannongallery.com.au
Altar, 2017
Ciutadella Park, 2017
Concordia, 2017
Curtain call, 2017
Drag, 2017
Edgecombe stack, 2017
Fall, 2017
Luna, 2017
Morning order, 2017
Part time lover, 2017
Pink cliffs, 2017
Rendezvous, 2017
Ritual endings, 2017
Seedling, 2017
Spanish city, 2017
Torremolinos, 2017
Black Hill no. 7, 2017 oil on board 90 x 90 cm $4,500 incl. GST
Black Hill no. 8, 2017 oil on board 122 x 90 cm $5,500 incl. GST
Black Hill no. 9, 2017 oil on board 86 x 90 cm $4,500 incl. GST
Black Hill no. 10, 2017 60 x 60 cm $2,500 incl. GST
Black Hill no. 11, 2017 oil on board 60 x 60 cm $2,500 incl. GST
Black Hill no. 12, 2017
Black Hill no. 13, 2017
ROSS TAYLOR BIOGRAPHY 1982 Born in Northumberland, UK EDUCATION 2001 2005 Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours (Painting/Art History), University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 2003 2004 Akademie de Bildenden Kunste, Munich, Germany SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 Eurovision, Neospace, Melbourne 2016 Pleasure Business, The Alderman, Melbourne 2015 Twice the First Time, Stockroom, Kyneton, VIC 2012 Phatland, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne Phatland, Stockroom, Kyneton, VIC 2009 I Knew She d Be Back, Seventh Gallery, Melbourne 2008 Move Any Mountain, Project Slogan, Aberdeen, UK 2006 Ross Paul Taylor, Art Space Tetra, Fukuoka, Japan SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017 Technician s Choice, Bundoora Homestead Art Centre, Melbourne 2016 Belonging to the Night, Stockroom, Kyneton, VIC A Possible World, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston, TAS John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery, Gippsland, VIC 2014 Deep Time, tcb, Melbourne 2011 The Rest is Silence, Death Be Kind, Melbourne Need to Seem to Glimpse, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne 2010 Fear of a Tech Planet, c3 Contemporary Art Space, Melbourne Short Stories, Helen Gory Galerie, Melbourne 2007 Private Prop, Residence Gallery, London, UK Showcase, Xsite Architecture, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 2006 Give Them Enough Rope, Projection Gallery, Liverpool, UK (coinciding with the Liverpool Biennial) Front Door, Back Gate, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK Normalife Unlimited, Neal s Yard, Carnaby Street, London, UK 2005 Fields of Vision: Extremes, Institute of New Media, Frankfurt, Germany Artfayre, Waygood Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK Home, Normalife Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK 2004 Gamut, Globe Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK Explosion2!, Pasinger Fabrik, Munich, Germany 2003 BLEND, Normalife Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK AWARDS, GRANTS AND RESIDENCIES 2016 John Leslie Art Prize (finalist) 2007 I Knew She d Be Back DVD commissioned by Arts Council England 2006 Mackellar Architecture Artist Placement Award Arts Council England Travel Grant for the Arts (Fukuoka, Japan) What s Missing? Initiatives, Globe Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK Art Space Tetra, Fukuoka, Japan
PUBLICATIONS Elvis Richardson and Claire Lambe (eds.), The Rest is Silence: Death and the Skull in Contemporary Art, Melbourne: Death Be Kind, 2012 REVIEWS Dr Kent Wilson, Twice the First Time, The Submachine, 22 October 2015 Dan Rule, Deep Time, The Age, 8 August 2014 COLLECTIONS Private collections in Australia and the UK