TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY is pleased to present Cakes and Shapes, a group exhibition featuring works by artists Vicki Sher, Gary Komarin, Jacqueline Utley, Lance Letscher and Eleanor Moreton on view from May 13th through June 12th, 2022.
Vicki Sher creates a reductive language from abstract, colorful lines and shapes on varying media. Over the past three decades, she has honed her aesthetic to capture the pertinent qualities of fluid geometric shapes. Presenting circles, oddly shaped squares, and half-moons that dance across translucent drafting film, Sher’s artwork aims to elevate an individual’s spirits.
A master of post-painterly abstraction, Gary Komarin’s stalwart images have an epic quality that grip the viewer with the idea that he or she is looking at a contemporary description of something timeless. His style, a merger of painting and drawing, pays tribute to his mentor, Philip Guston. Komarin’s Cakes break the picture plane of his rich and elegantly composed color fields.
Sourced from biological and archival material, workers’ information, art historical sources, magazines and journals, Jacqueline Utley’s dreamlike paintings are populated with quietly self-contained women. They relax on furniture, engage in contemplation, play musical instruments, and tend to children. The palette is both undeniably surrealist and gendered. It’s as though a feminist voice is reappropriating the dreamscape from the male-dominated voices of the Surrealist tradition.
Lance Letscher’s collages are accumulations of tiny bits of paper taken from a myriad of sources. His compositions, driven by a piecemeal aesthetic with a meticulously obsessive sensitivity to color and content, evoke both the expansiveness of the cosmos and the complex detail of microcellular life forms. Crafted with a rich and vibrant vocabulary eliciting discovery by his viewers, Letscher’s works engage us with their poetry and intricacy.
Unsettling and dreamlike, Eleanor Moreton builds fantastic fairy worlds peppered with fabled drama. With the richness of an old world tapestry, her world comes alive on canvas-- weasels bound, ravens lurk, children wander. There is an unmistakeable childlike wonder to her brush, underscored by a deeply intellectual longing for something that goes beyond the literal into the literary. "My characters precariously inhabit a world on the edge of the woods, on the edge of their own animal, wild selves and on the edge of the more unruly aspects of their minds," she says.
