Portfolio: Taylor Chapin
Still Life with Organic Banana, 2022, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in.
[Image description: Two hands, wearing pink camouflage gloves, hold a banana covered in a black and white chevron pattern, all in front of a blue camouflage backdrop.]
Self-aware and humorous, Taylor Chapin examines the ways in which consumerism has reached a point of fetishized ecstasy – a climax where we have hunted originality into extinction and submerged ourselves in an oversized bowl of easily consumable content and goods. À la the Museum of Ice Cream, consumption has reached a level of absurdity that has us chasing that sugar high while nursing our sugar addiction. Chapin critically subverts this canon with a “sorry not sorry” self-indulgence that lowers our guard long enough to have an honest conversation about our participation in this carefully-curated object orgy of nothingness.
The artist’s recent exhibition We Got Here Under False Pretenses, presented at the University of California, San Diego, showcased a series of still lifes of objects wrapped in elaborate patterns. Chapin’s intensive research into the socio-economic history of each pattern shines through in her work. The pink camouflage in Still Life with Organic Banana calls to mind the Trump Administration's green camo Space Force suits – because what better way to blend into the backdrop of infinite space and hide from all enemy forces than woodland camouflage? Hilarity aside, this move also suggests the power that this pattern holds within the U.S. zeitgeist, a dichotomy poignantly connected to Chapin’s understanding of the pattern and how the unconventional color embodies its real-life duality. While originally inspired by nature and designed to be utilitarian, this pattern has become audaciously unwilling to blend into the background, stubbornly striving to stand out and claim a sense of individualism.
Chapin looks back at the use of camouflage in Pop Art, where it functioned as a critique of society’s mass production of sheeple. At the same time, anti-war protestors used camo and flower-power symbols to subvert war propaganda. In this day and age, it has become a staple of self-expression, for some as a fashion statement that ebbs and flows with trends, and for others as a lifestyle commitment to hunting, country living, or military support. Through these lenses, Chapin explores each pattern she introduces. How has its use shifted? What are its migration, assimilation, and appropriation stories? And how does this interpretation change based on individual backgrounds?
Installation view, We Got Here Under False Pretenses, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 2022
[Image description: A gallery view of a wall covered in a dense black and white pattern. Two small paintings hang in equidistant positions on the wall.]
In the exhibition, Chapin installed Still Life with K-Y Personal Lubricant and Still Life with Haribo Goldbears on a wall that envelopes the paintings in an elaborate wallpaper of her own making. These works swamp our visual field, where they are both camouflaged and become larger than life as they fuse with the whole wall. The effect creates an earworm for the eyes; the pattern follows us around as we navigate the space, moving as we move, imprinting itself in our minds.
Still Life with Haribo Goldbears, 2021, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
[Image description: Five ambiguous objects wrapped in floral, harlequin, and checked patterns sit against a black and white chevron backdrop.]
Filled with care and gentleness, the pure time and intimacy of painting a pattern demand patience and commitment. Coupled with the explosive, in-your-face encounter of her work, we can’t help but jump on this rollercoaster ride of visual information and see where it takes us. It invites us to ponder what objects we are looking at, decipher the codes that our pattern recognition human brains were designed to do, and inadvertently end up spending more time with and caring more about these everyday objects than we ever have before.
Still Life with K-Y Personal Lubricant, 2022, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
[Image description: Seven objects— wrapped in striped, chevron, checked, and polka dot patterns— sit against a black and white chevron backdrop.]
The dryness (except for maybe the K-Y lube) in the selection of objects portrayed in Chapin’s work feels enthusiastically banal: just a bunch of everyday stuff. And yet this “stuff,” as so perfectly explained by Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, was carefully selected for us by some people in a room somewhere. We are unwitting consumers at the teat of this cash cow where the “Got Milk?” slogan has convinced us that this consumption will keep us healthy, happy, and satiated.
By shrouding the objects in overwhelming patterns, Chapin creates a space in which we have to slow down in order to process what we are looking at, leaving room for the objects’ and patterns’ personalities to reveal themselves in their own time and at their own pace. She treats them like old friends coming together for a masqueraded reunion after a lifetime of stories. Initially tentative and shy to reveal much, they feel familiar, but fundamentally changed. Like a name tag, “Hello, my name is …”, the products are only alluded to in the titles of the work.
Still Life with Charles Shaw Merlot, 2021, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in.
[Image description: A hand in a black-and-white checked glove holds a wine bottle covered in a black-and-white chevron pattern, both in front of a green and red floral backdrop.]
Throughout art history, the still life has served as a celebration of the everyday object, a showcase for personal riches and memento mori; from the decadence of a well-laid table to the rancid deterioration of food that has been sitting out too long. Chapin disguises the memento mori into near oblivion, where the denial of our mortality both haunts us and pushes us to memorialize every moment of our lives, whether real or fake. Like a still life, our lives have become a precisely-selected mix of objects, their value based on the careful branding of conglomerates that feed off our fears of forgottenness. Thus, in the process of circumventing our obscurity, we have fallen prey to zombified consumption. As 17th-century poet Jean de La Fontaine famously said, “A person often meets [their] destiny on the road [they] took to avoid it.”
Chapin’s work is immensely satisfying to any mind who finds ease in the order and structure of a well-made pattern. Coupled with the detailed research into the history of the patterns she uses, the objects selected, and the anonymity of it all, the paintings reveal the layered nature of her practice. Overwhelming, intriguing, humorous, and self-reflective, there is accessibility in her self-mockery that allows us to drop our walls and engage with her ideas in a more genuine way that is separated from judgment. Chapin allows us to be critical of the way we consume and the systems that surround that consumption, while also impressing upon us that it is ok to give ourselves some slack, occasionally.
— Guusje Sanders, Associate Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego