Selected Work
In an unprecedented manner, Galleri Urbane has the honor of hosting Loring Taoka’s second solo exhibition in the same year. A follow-up to February’s exhibition, Counteract, Taoka’s latest body of work reflects numerous bold developments that have occurred in the months since. I’m Going Hunting furthers Taoka’s investigation of perception, utilizing his paintings on plexiglass that lie at the crux of the digital and physical realms.
Taoka’s paintings are grounded in ideas of the known and the unknown. Using geometry as a point of departure, he disfigures these universal principles to analyze how information can convey multiple and/or opposing meanings. Through this process he highlights how one’s own conclusions to deem something as real or fake, true or false, are formed through our own relative experience of the world and the information we are fed. Ultimately the judgements that are drawn, however true they may be, are linked to processes of forging a fixed identity. By blurring the edges surrounding matter-of-fact subjects, Taoka works to abstract these notions of truth and authenticity.
Wherein last winter’s exhibition found Taoka pushing the complexity of his geometric images, this series of paintings certainly continues the course. Significant to this factor are new methods of production that introduce voids in the plexiglass panels. Intricately interacting with the artist’s painted geometries, these removed portions distort how one processes the work’s visual information and further complicate how the compositions are perceived. In addition, color choice continues to stray far from the artist’s early affinity for working with a grayscale. Vibrant hues of magenta to pale peaches and sky blue create a spectrum that capture what a digital sunset might look like. By utilizing these complex gradients, Taoka’s semi-dimensional images resist their static attributes and are more akin to an oscillating graphic on a digital screen.
Altogether, the work in I’m Going Hunting lies in a grey area between the physical and the digital, the concise and the convoluted, inviting viewers to formulate their own subjective conclusions from the given information.
