Artist-in-residence:
pace taylor
Pace Taylor, courtesy of the artist
Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) is pleased to announce Pace Taylor as the second Artist-in-Residence of 2024. Taylor will join us for a two-week residency this month from June 17 - June 28, developing limited-edition prints and working with master printer, Judith Baumann. This is Taylor’s inaugural residency with Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, made possible through the Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Award grant program.
Please join us for a public, in-person reception for the work they created while in residence on Thursday, June 27, 2024 from 5pm-7pm.
Pace Taylor (b. 1992) is an artist preoccupied with intimacy and who we choose to build it with. Using charcoal and soft pastels on paper their work gestures to the looming and elusive crux of belonging—both as a guiding concept and a visceral feeling. As they describe, “Through these images I attempt to create space that others, and myself, can project into and be embraced; an offer to be held by another’s language.” Their work is often vibrantly quiet, very queer, and persistently vulnerable.
Taylor received their BFA in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon (2015), and have since shown their work internationally, including at the Nationale (Portland, OR), Double V Gallery (Paris, FR), and La Loma Projects (Los Angeles, CA). They have participated in the Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Residency at Caldera, Tropical Contemporary’s Transformation Residency, Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency, and received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2022. Most recently, they were awarded the Don Bachardy Fellowship by The Christopher Isherwood Foundation at the Royal Drawing School of London. Taylor currently lives and works in Portland, OR. They are represented by the Nationale in Portland, OR.
Here, Taylor articulates the intricacies of their work and practice: "In these figurative drawings, I am distilling years of being a witness, and sometimes a voyeur, to other’s relationships, breaking them down into mutable planes of soft pastel and the specificity of graphite. I have found comfort in re-constructing scenes from found and self-produced photographs and populating a space outside of time with imagined community: friends, foes, and the nameless familiars existing in our peripheries. However, daily concerns of acceptance and communication bleed through. As my own unreliable narrator in social interactions, I have spent much of my life picking apart how it is that people find community. This bleeds into my work through shades of the grotesque with flattened or skewed perspective and form. Still, as a romantic, this preoccupation with intimacy includes dreaming up ways it can exist, as well as acknowledging its failed states. In much of my practice, I find satisfaction in framing and developing my own ideas around the works and words of other artists; entering into a conversation and collaging a personal lineage."
Pace Taylor, my soul left my body at the 7-Eleven (just for a moment), 2024, soft pastel and pencil on paper, 26 x 40 in
Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts is located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in the foothills of Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Crow’s Shadow is a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organization formed in 1992 by local artists James Lavadour (Walla Walla) and Phillip Cash Cash (Cayuse and Nez Perce). Our mission is to provide a creative conduit for educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. Over the last 32 years Crow’s Shadow has evolved into a world class studio focused on contemporary fine art printmaking.
