Brett Taylor

HERE I STAND displays eight prints of legs at differing stages of ability and rehabilitation, created using photogravure and silk screen, hung on top of a six foot two inch, text mural stating HERE I STANDING IS HARD, and a vinyl floor drawing connecting the prints depicting the imprints and marks made when navigating space with different walking assists including crutches, a wheelchair, and a cain. The exhibition illustrates the spectrum of (dis)ability emphasizing the impermanence and fluctuation of ability.

Sit/Seat considers the central question(s) of what it means to have to sit/ to have a seat considering multiple lenses of access and accessibility. The work encourages viewers to take a seat and view the work that is divided by a chair rail, hung at the ADA compliant hanging height, separating the composition into varying proportions of figural and abstract compositions. The auto-theoretical work considers personal narrative, disability and queer aesthetics/theory while challenging normative spatial conventions through compositional and instillational applications.

This ongoing series of broadsides, a print on a single sheet of paper, advocates for human rights issues centered around disability justice. The prints are displayed in the gallery, wheat-pasted to multiple wooden panels, mimicking their presence in built environments, and on posterized city benches, inviting viewers to use the space to converse and speculate about imagined accessible futures. Viewers are encouraged to take a broadside with them into their lived spaces, sparking larger community dialogue about disability justice.

Waiting Room is an ongoing instillation of X-Ray illumination boxes, layers of transparent prints, and waiting room chairs. The instillation explores the de/re/uncomposing of the body through the reintroduction of self to the self abstracted atop x-ray boxes. Layers of transparency depicting the margins that once surrounded the “ideal male figure” are impermanently held together sandwiched between metal clasps. With the masculine figure removed the new abstracted and reoriented printed images challenge static definitions of the body pushing back at the permeance of the print and embracing temporality, change, and becoming. Light illuminates a constellation of boxes bringing to attention the many layers opaqued by the reconstruction that proceeds it.

Blueprints is a series of large-scale woodblock prints on yupo paper created through the collaging and reclamation of inaccessible spaces onto and on top of the body. Taking the form of Blueprints these potential spaces exist in the in between as utopian drafts never physically realized.

Reassurance is an unbound book of 30 monotypes supported and held together by a medical crutch set to 6’2”. The book parallel to the body is temporal, slowly changing and aging as the pages turn, one page opaquing the previous one till all pages fall, fully reassured by the crutch.

Serial Selves is an unbound book and video instillation created on a scanner. The printing press and the scanner presents a relationship where the artist is the first author and audience only divided by a moment of full opacity The book explores self-authorship as it relates to printmaking and photography. The repeated action of arranging and rearranging acknowledges the multiplicity of bodily possibilities striving for maximum potential while accepting failure.