Paul Taylor

Paul Gregory Ortiz de Montellano Taylor is my full name. My mother was born in Mexico City; she met my father while they were both in college on the east coast. My parents were poets and language scholars. They taught for a time at Carleton College, in Northfield, MN, where I grew up. My parents imbued me with a love of nature—they dragged me along on hikes and canoe trips when I was a kid—as well as a reverence for the arts. They supported my creative endeavors during years in which I felt a societal pressure to go into math or science. As much as my parents’ influence has shaped who I am today, I am equally impacted by their loss. My mother committed suicide the summer I graduated from college, succumbing to a lifelong battle with depression. This had and continues to have a profound effect on my life and work. Feeling unmoored, I spent several years oscillating between the desire to go back to school for architecture or visual art, while working as a carpenter and continuing with my art practice. Ultimately, I decided to move to California to pursue my MFA at UC Davis. I continue to live in California, and to be inspired by the landscape that surrounds me, as well as the creative people within my community.

My work is open-ended—I use it to ask questions rather than provide answers. I have been hesitant to share my thoughts on my work in the past, largely because I don’t want people to feel pushed toward some sort of prescribed response to what I create. However, I’ve come to the position that it could be beneficial, for those that are curious, to share some of my own ideas, motivations, and feelings about my work, as well as some of the ways that certain projects came into being. Below are some reflections on a few of my ongoing projects:

Performance-based works — Digital Trust Hike, #selfiesuit, Disappearing Suit

The Digital Trust Hike grew from my unease at the ways in which my smartphone was beginning to affect my interactions with my physical environment. I had just moved to San Francisco, and found myself using my phone to navigate as I tried to wrap my head around my new surroundings. Increasingly, my attention narrowed to this small screen, my physical presence reduced to a pulsing blue dot on the map. I decided to push this to the extreme, replacing my sensory inputs with phone apps as I went for a walk up Taylor Street. I wore a foam helmet to limit my view to the device in my hand. I had volunteers stationed at every intersection—they would call me as I approached and tell me when it was safe to cross the street. Although my sensory experience narrowed, the outsourcing of my physical safety to other people became a very emotionally powerful act. I was held by their words, and felt a sense of euphoria which was entirely unexpected.

In thinking about the popularity of selfies, I developed the #selfiesuit, a project that relates to the Digital Trust Hike in that both examine facets of digital culture and their effects on our behavior. The #selfiesuit, constructed from mirrored panels, is a way to short-circuit selfie taking by reversing the polarity of this action. When I take a selfie while wearing the suit, I am taking a photo of the outside world, and when someone takes a photo of the suit, they are taking a selfie. The suit attracts crowds of people in public places, while obscuring my identity as the wearer. Although I become a spectacle, I am relatively immune to one of the desired results of selfie-taking—the ability for an individual to place their unique selves in a particular place and time. In other words, I am a spectacle and in hiding simultaneously.

My desires to hide, to disappear, to become one with my environment while ceasing to exist as an individual are all expressed in the Disappearing Suit. This suit is functionally the same as the #selfiesuit, minus the text on the chest panel, but by relocating my activities to isolated, natural locations, the function of the suit changes in kind. There is a tension in my attempts to dematerialize into nature, as the blocky, digitally fabricated form of the suit contrasts with its wild surroundings. This, and the other performance-based works I discuss here, are meditations on the effects of digital immersion on our desire for connection with each other and with our environment. For me, one of the ironies of spending more and more time on our devices, interacting with social media for example, is that we become more physically isolated, and more detached from analog reality.

Anonymous Infrastructure

I started to develop this series of site-specific installations, or interventions, while I was in graduate school at UC Davis. Each piece begins when I select an object, usually a part of everyday infrastructure, that I am drawn to in some way. Often I am drawn to the object’s formal qualities (the gentle curves of a standpipe, for example). In many cases I am drawn to its symbolic qualities as well (such as the way bollards or lift-gates control and constrain our movement). I re-create this object while tweaking its form, materials, or text, and re-insert it into my environment. The context of these bits of infrastructure becomes a part of the pieces themselves, and often they evade detection through a form of camouflage, by looking like they belong. These works are a way for me to honor those bits of physical reality that escape our notice, and to examine issues of control, physical or conceptual boundaries, and isolation or loneliness.

Drawings

Although my series of drawings began as a distinct project, it has become obvious to me that they are formally and conceptually linked to my other work. Like the Disappearing Suit, the drawings record rectilinear, minimal forms that fade into their background. There is a tension between the objects themselves, created digitally and transferred to the page mechanically in a white, dry medium, and the backgrounds laid down in ink, a liquid medium that is hard to control. Originally inspired by the vestigial military structures in the Marin Headlands, some of these objects take on an element of melancholy. Their original function has faded away and they are in the process of being subsumed by the landscape. For me, the figures in these drawings carry an element of loss—loss of people and things, but also of memories—as they appear to be only partially there, or perhaps in the process of fading away. However, the figures are also fleshed out by the layers of ink that make up their background. They are located on the page and defined by their environment, in much the same way that we are grounded and defined by the environments we inhabit.