Courtesy: the artist and Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland.

Sanderson presents the solo exhibition Visual Linguistics by Kāryn Taylor. Taylor is a multi-disciplinary artist who manipulates materials, light, form and shadow to produce self-illuminating light boxes and multi-dimensional installations that challenge our perception of the structures that ground our reality.

Taylor’s practice is informed by geometric abstraction, a concept that has long been used to explore complex philosophical notions that transcend the physical realm. Spirituality, light, time and perception can all be experienced but cannot be physically grasped nor easily explained. For Taylor, geometric abstraction is a conduit: allowing the artist to describe unknowable ideas that are beyond the everyday, enabling us to engage in a deeper knowledge of existence.

Language can be viewed as a logical system of written, signed or spoken words, with which we communicate and express ourselves. Taylor’s practice and exhibition concepts, touch on the intersection between scientific knowledge and language. In Visual Linguistics Taylor uses form, colour and light to optically suggest a new descriptive language of the universe. She is interested in how this language might hold specific frequencies that bypass the mind, allowing us to subliminally take in information.

Taylor’s analogue light boxes are intense in colour with their radiant lines of light that defy logic – glowing without power. Their illumination is striking; convincing many that there must be some kind of hidden mechanism or light source. Through their illusionism, they provide a visual dialect that encodes a divergent experience of perception. They are a gateway to understanding what we don’t know and how we exist within that.

Taylor was a finalist in the Fulbright Wallace Award, Parkin Drawing Prize, the Waikato Contemporary Art Award and the Lola Anne Tunbridge Award. In 2023 she presented a large scale public exhibition Future Philosophies at The Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatu, Nelson. She lives and works in Nelson Whakatu.

Follow this artist