C Magazine

January 1st, 2009

C Inside Culver City “For emerging artists, we love Taylor De Cordoba.”

V Magazine

December 10th, 2008

BASEL 24/7: Linlee Allen shares a diary of a typical day during Art Basel Miami Beach. “At Aqua Wynwood I’m floored by L.A. artist Frohawk Two Feathers and his latest offerings….”

Pen with New Attitude No. 235

December 1st, 2008

by Chinami Inaishi. Article covering Los Angeles galleries.

COVER VERSION curated by Timothy Hull

June 28th, 2008

Cover Version: Curated by Timothy Hull
June 28 – August 9, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday June 28th, 2008 6pm-9pm

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down a particular path than we have yet go ourselves.”  E.M. Forster

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Cover Version, a group exhibition curated by NY-based artist Timothy Hull. Hull has asked approximately twenty artists from around the country to create their own version of the cover of their favorite book. The only parameters are that the piece must be average book size and include the title and author in the composition. Scott Hug, Mathew Cerletty, Kadar Brock, Jennifer Sullivan, Ryan Callis and Frohawk Two Feathers are among the participating artists. The exhibition will run from June 28 – August 9. The gallery will host an opening reception on Saturday June 28 from 6-9PM.

Cover Version focuses on the idea of book cover as inadvertent cultural symbol and indicator of taste. Visually, the front of a book must illuminate the content or emotional resonance of the book within a moment’s glance, regardless of actual content. Although we have idiomatically been reminded NOT to judge a book by its cover, often this is precisely how we choose them. Thus, publishing companies have known covers to play a crucial role in creating the aura of a book, becoming the icon and the symbol, which tells us not only what but how we will read. Famous book covers become as culturally important and layered as the book itself; J.D. Salinger’s yellow and red cover for The Catcher in Rye for instance or Germano Facetti’s iconic covers for Penguin.

The act of making an idiosyncratic copy of a book cover is in essence a ‘cover of a cover,’ to use the popular music term or a “cover version” as the title of the show suggests. This meaning can be both metaphoric and literal. In a cover, the song is reinterpreted and rearranged to suit the message or need of the performer. It is also an associative indicator of taste, as the performer of the cover is thus associated with the preconceived approval of the song as being part of a canon. Likewise, the cover of a preferred book will be either copied or created anew to give a wholly different interpretation of the visual essence of the book, as well as to associate the spirit and cultural capital of the book towards the artist. The act of choosing plays an important role in this exhibition; the choice being as compelling as the cover. Artists will be re-imagining the covers of To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes and The Book of Mormon, among others.

KIMBERLY BROOKS: Technicolor Summer

May 10th, 2008

Kimberly Brooks: Technicolor Summer

May 10 – June 14, 2008

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Technicolor Summer, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Kimberly Brooks. The exhibition will run from May 10 – June 14. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday May 10th from 6pm-9pm. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

In her new series of oil paintings, Brooks explores the relationship between human and nature. Using the sweeping California landscape as a backdrop, from the forests of Yosemite to the bewildering expanse of the Pacific Ocean, she introduces characters that are unified by the mutual awe for their surroundings. Based on her personal experience, Brooks focuses on a family grappling with illness, where the prospect of death renders every moment vivid, and each meal and sunset matters. The scenes are from a summer experienced in high definition; where every leaf on a tree becomes visible simultaneously, and life is lived in Technicolor.

CLAIRE OSWALT: Trustfall

March 15th, 2008

Claire Oswalt: Trustfall
March 15 – April 15, 2008

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 15, 6-9pm

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present Trustfall, a new series of sculptural drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Claire Oswalt. The exhibition will run from March 15 through April 19, 2008. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday March 15th from 6-9pm.

This is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery. With her puppets made from wood, twine, and graphite on paper, Oswalt explores an increasingly complex adult world with a childlike simplicity and curiosity. The push and pull between control and freedom is pervasive throughout her series: from a girl being blown away, to the clothes that have fallen on the floor, to a man falling out of his chair. Her puppets demonstrate a sense of restricted movement, while the title of her series suggests an unrestrained freefall, made possible only with trust. Oswalt ensures that each fall is a fall in the right direction, or to a safe place. And although they are put into a position that lacks control, the puppets put their trust in the artist and subsequently the viewer. In this sense, the puppets welcome us into their world as we explore the trials and tribulations of “falling” in love and falling through life. Though Trustfall is theatrical with its changing backdrops and Pinnochio-esque qualities, its characters instill a quiet sense of realism that prompt the viewer to ponder the simple aesthetic quality which propels these puppets into our world.

FROHAWK TWO FEATHERS: In the Court of the Crimson King

February 8th, 2008

Frohawk Two Feathers: In the Court of the Crimson King

February 2 – March 8, 2008

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present In The Court Of The Crimson King, a new series of paintings and drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Frohawk Two Feathers. The exhibition will run from February 2 through March 8, 2008. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday February 2 from 6-9pm. Violinist Shigeru will perform 19th century sonatas during the reception. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

Two Feathers continues to demonstrate his skills as a master storyteller with a modern take on the age-old themes of colonialism, imperialism and conquest. In these large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper, he creates a wartime narrative starring an imagined cast of characters. Two Feathers revisits the Frenglish Emperor Nancy in his quest to avenge his father’s death. As the villain, Lord William uses his influence as a nobleman and general of the Imperial Frenglish Army to stage a coup and overthrow Nancy and his mother. He proceeds to partition the empire and rename the areas loyal to him and his confederates, Anglica. This series chronicles William’s brief rule and the beginning of the re-conquest of Frengland by Nancy and his old enemies (now allies), the Inuit. Two Feather’s reappropriation of classical tenets of history and storytelling makes for a sometimes amusing and always poignant body of work. All artworks are loosely based on the lyrics of the song “In The Court Of The Crimson King” (written by Peter Sinfield) by the psych rock group King Crimson.

JEANA SOHN: My Hands are Crispy

December 15th, 2007

Jeana Sohn:  My Hands Are Crispy
December 15 – January 26, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday December 15, 2007, 6-9pm

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present My Hands Are Crispy, a new series of paintings on panel and paper by Los Angeles-based artist Jeana Sohn.  The exhibition will run from December 15 through January 26, 2008.  The gallery will host an opening reception for the artist on Saturday December 15 from 6-9PM.
Drawing upon bedtime fairy tales, poetry, nature and modern graphic design, Jeana Sohn paints a surreal world where fanciful situations can instantly turn dark. In one piece a bowing girl carries an axe and chopped wood on her back as swarming moths surround her.  Another scene of a girl floating amidst giant blue leaves looks peaceful until we see that arrows pierce her back.  The tension between serenity and violence/aggression runs through these new paintings.

Sohn’s work has always emphasized storytelling – a piece would typically be focused on a character, and a narrative would be implied by that character’s non-specific, and hopefully poetic, interactions with animals, little pieces of nature, and graphic elements. In this new series, the work is also about her process of art-making.  Her intention was to let her hands create without her mind dominating the process. The title, My Hands Are Crispy, refers to the recent detachment she has felt from the process.  This body of work is the result of her struggle to overcome her out-of-shape and “crispy” hands and enter a meditative mindset.

Heather Taylor Interviewed in Elle Magazine

October 31st, 2007

Click to enlarge

A GREAT DELICACY, curated by Melissa Levin

October 20th, 2007

A Great Delicacy, Curated by Melissa Levin

October 20 – December 1, 2007

Taylor De Cordoba is pleased to present A Great Delicacy, a group show featuring 5 New York based artists, curated by Melissa Levin. A great delicacy can be an indulgence, but is also a way (with which) to render and create. The artists in this show are making work about food, sex, waste spills in the ocean, and the ways we digest or filter our own consumption. And there is an awareness in the work of the way we consume, a great delicacy in the treatment of the concepts and the rendering whether through photography, painting, drawing or collage. Generally it is more and more possible to become disconnected from what we eat, with whom we make love, where our waste goes after it leaves our cars, homes, and bodies. Each of the artists represented in this show are attentive to these things, if not in awe of them.

Rebecca Veit and Kathryn Hillier’s still lives, from their series, The Never Wilting Flower Project, are beautiful and strange. Using food and objects shopped mostly at farmers and flea markets in both Paris and New York, the photographs direct your experience of these moments as they might never occur – like a pineapple painted gold and used for its odd body or a post-coital pomegranate torn apart and resting in front of a dense red curtain.

Michael Bilsborough’s drawings are simultaneously wild and controlled, sometimes erotic, and often grotesque. They are depictions of orgies inside perfectly constructed architecture and using perfect perspective. Figures might be repeated several times, performing different acts, often on one another. Devoid of sensuality, or voluptuous flesh, these scenes are anonymous but charged and are especially so in a world so saturated with generic sexual imagery focused on titillation and usually for sale. Ultimately, in Bilsborough’s work, there is a great conflation of the most attractive opposites, the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

This combination of the excessive and the restrained also appears in a different form in Gregory Parma Smith’s paintings. There is something very decadent in his renderings of generic things like strawberries or a pocketknife. It is as if he has gone deep inside of the thing (and of painting itself) and extracted the elements of its Platonic iteration. The subjects and surfaces of his paintings are therefore exquisite and pristine, but also luscious and very exciting.

McKendree Key’s collages are part of a series called Possibilities “based on the infinite number of possible scenarios taking place in the North-Pacific Gyre.” The North-Pacific Gyre, located between Asia and North America in the Pacific Ocean, has been described as “soupy with plastic”* because of the amount of waste it contains – mostly due to large spills from container ships. There are not images of the spills and in response, Key has created collaged waves filled with computer monitors, Nike shoes, umbrellas and traffic cones – a comment on the proliferation of needless and ignorant over-consumption. *From “Beach: Nike Shoes Wash Up”, by Janice Posada of The Daily Herald (Everett, Washington, 2001)

And Danica Phelps’ records of spending, earning and making love, from the series Integrating Sex into Everyday Life, are a detailed and obsessive daily documentation. These quantitative and qualitative accounts provide a more literal iteration of the intake and output of things in the world. This kind of record can appear detached but here it remains a highly personal account of daily struggles and triumphs