Things Past, a solo exhibition by Damian Taylor.
Things Past offers a concise visual history of technology from around 40,000 years ago to today, centred around clouds with support from hands. This history is unstable. The works are unstable. If the light changes the works change, a positive image becoming a negative or simply disappearing. New histories emerge as new forms coalesce and dissolve. Light reanimates the old light of photographs, animating past lives. Boundaries are breached. The fixed becomes unfixed. Something of the work of dreams, maybe: banality and beauty and tenderness and horror combining to form oddly meaningful connections. Or forming a yearning for connection. The urge to touch hands that have long since been lost. The desire to collapse time and space, to connect an unfathomably ancient impulse and a new dawn.
Working in a medium poised awkwardly between painting and photography, Damian Taylor is interested in exploring what it is to see and be seen, what it is to touch and to be touched, and the consequences of visibility or touch being withheld. Establishing a pictorial space in which familiar histories become strange and strange histories familiar, he aspires to make sincerely beautiful paintings—troubled paintings touched at times by soft horror.
About the artist:
Damian Taylor's work has featured in over a dozen solo shows and been included in group exhibitions internationally. He has held fellowships at Yale and Oxford and was a prize winner in the 2023 John Moores Painting Prize.
