TAYLOR CHAPIN

 We Got Here Under False Pretenses

Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego - 252 Russel Ln, La Jolla

May 30th - June 10th, 2022

We Got Here Under False Pretenses examines advertising, branding, superficiality, and the construction of value under the umbrella of American neoliberal capitalism. This body of painting-based work questions our mindless drive toward industrialized American consumerism, the contents of which fill and fetishize our interior and exterior spaces. The work is based on compositions that drape, wrap, and cover bodies and objects with various patterned fabrics to transform once recognizable forms into abstracted shapes, semi-composed inklings of what lies underneath. The additive layer of multiple brightly colored, patterned facades highlights the addictive structure of over-stimulation as a gesture towards the American tendency to champion superficial accumulation.

This series deliberately obscures forms via covering, creating multi-layered, illusory facades. Human bodies and consumer goods are ensconced in pattern and color, emphasizing their inherent banality while simultaneously enshrining and transforming their visual structures of identification as a way of critiquing the perception of value. Through the lack of a reveal, it is left unknowable which cloaked forms contain commercial/societal value, challenging our perceptions of what is real/unreal, valuable/valueless. It is this illusory quality of the veneer, complete with implied volume and depth, that bemuses and betrays the two dimensional space of the stretched canvas as the painted surface becomes an additional layer of the facade.

For inquires, please contact taylormchapin@gmail.com

www.taylorchapin.com