Everything All At Once
Taylor Baldwin
Extended through March 31st
with hours Saturday and Sunday 1-5, or by appointment
Wayfarers is pleased to present Everything All At Once, the first NYC solo exhibition of work by sculptor Taylor Baldwin. The show features three multi-media sculptures and two videos that Baldwin has created in the last four years while working under a set of self-imposed limitations or fixed controls. This type of restraint/creation has historical precedence in post-iconoclast Byzantine icon painters, who believed that by ritualizing and regulating their behavior, they could repress the human and elevate the spirit. For Baldwin (as for Joseph Beuys and Anish Kapoor) the spirit could be understood as intuitive intelligence, so authoring the “belief system” that forefronts intuitive response is tantamount to authoring the object.
In the plague year, for example, some of the fixed controls included limiting his engagement with other people, minimizing his exposure to language, and centering himself in his body every two hours through a regimented drum practice in order to create a life-sized self-portrait. The free-standing sculpture incorporates materials as diverse as a prehistoric whale ear bone, cymbal stands, a limited edition Slurpee straw, a melted Solo cup, and his ex-girlfriend’s toothbrush. In the oracle, he used the I Ching as a way of filtering his decisions, and subjected himself to sonic therapy/neurological waveform brain stimulation. Baldwin’s fixed controls serve to sublimate the artist’s ego in order to allow more intuitive response to materials, which have most often have entered his studio through another restrictive filter he considers the “alternate economy” of gifting, finding or bartering. These materials’ histories have a negentropic effect on the work, drawing the chaos of their diverse origins into a compressed cogency, as evidenced in this excerpt from Baldwin’s materials list for the oracle:
trunk from christmas tree found curbside in may, gold chain, epoxy resin, colorant, machine axel, bnc-to-tree connector, coaxial cable, asphalt, wood screws, aluminum, poplar, urethane adhesive, laminate, cabinet speaker found curbside in january, , speaker, plastic lemon and ice from guangzhou economic and technological development zone, 4-40 socket screws, 3 pennies in final moving yang line configuration, silver paint marker, audio component amplifier, audio adaptor cables, styrofoam, sculpy bust of oetzi the iceman, copper leaf, led element from bathroom fixture in condemned home, screw covers, 120v wall sockets, light switch from bathroom in condemned home, grounded power cable and cable clamp from scrapped pc hardware store register, furniture pads, particle board from curbside furniture, kombucha bottle superstitiously saved since 2014, reconfigured graffiti-ed office desk left in studio from diy venue ‘supertomb’, corian trim from trident dumpster, reconditioned hitachi v-202f oscilloscope, lag bolts, polystyrene display foot from shuttered show store in burlington vt, driftwood, custom rca-to-1/8” audio cable, headphone cable from Mel’s last christmas gift, dresser knob from janelle, anatomical skeleton bracket, ‘happu-store ancient i ching coins prosperity protection feng shui lucky charm’ from eshylala store, power supply, zip ties, plastic skeletal arm traded with corey for as-yet-undelivered work, black flocking, mannequin hand, pipe cleaners found on street outside adult care facility, copper foil from barb, leather, plywood, c-channel, laminate from kiosk found behind AM/PM, coaxial wall plate, electronic components, arduino uno, raspberry pi 3, 7in. hdmi monitor, hdmi cable, 2-way mirrored plexiglass, acrylic, brass screws from warehouse liquidation, screws, double-sided tape, led strips, tin foil, time-series of charles minard’s flow map of napolean’s russian invasion and successive attempts to improve upon it (1869-2015), drum stick broken in personal injury and later used as stirring stick for the period of 2-years, video loop of planed wood grain, every used copy of translations of ‘i ching’ from within a 20 mile radius of the artist purchased between the period of january-august 2017
Taylor Baldwin (b. Tucson, AZ, 1983) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. He has been a resident at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, the Seven Below Arts Initiative, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. Baldwin has exhibited work at Spring Break Art Show (New York, NY), Conner Contemporary Gallery (Washington D.C.), Land of Tomorrow Gallery (Louisville, KY), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) as well as in groups shows at the Queens Museum of Art (NY), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Norfolk, VA), the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft (Louisville, KY) and Zürcher Gallery (New York, NY). He is currently based in Queens, New York.
Everything All At Once can be seen on Saturday, March 23 and Sunday, March 24, from 1-5pm, and by appointment through March 30th at Wayfarers. Opening reception is Friday, March 22, 7-10pm, with artist talk at 8:30. Extended through March 31 with hours Saturday and Sunday 1-5pm.
