LA JOLLA, CA.- Quint Gallery is showing the exhibition 'Taylor Chapin: Rest Assured You Are In Good Hands' through May 11th by artist Taylor Chapin at their gallery and featured her work as part of the monthly Barrio Art Crawl event, a free self guided tour consisting of murals, open studios, galleries, and local businesses throughout the Barrio Arts District.
Working in both oil and acrylic, Taylor Chapin's paintings obscure form through multi-layered, illusory facades. She depicts mundane consumer goods wrapped in patterned fabrics, questioning how value is manufactured and challenging perceptions of reality. In her figurative works, Chapin enshrines anonymous bodies with pattern and color as a way of critiquing the perception of value. In both bodies of work, the distinctive features that construct human and commercial individuation are denied.
In Rest Assured, You Are in Good Hands, Chapin transforms an unidentifiable body covered completely in camouflage, into pure pattern and form. Painted in one-point perspective, a repetitive paisley background consumes the surroundings of the reclined figure, containing subversive narratives that stir up references to the history of art, culture, and conflict. In the 1960s anti-war movement, paisley became symbolic of the push for peace, and camouflage was often used subversively in Pop Art of the same period. Like these artists that explored the influence of mass media and rejected social norms, the anonymity of the figure here is used as a nudge toward a collective identity where the body of the individual is free from the constructs of societal rules.
Taylor Chapin received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute, and graduated in 2022 with a Master of Fine Arts at University of California, San Diego. Her work will be featured in a group exhibition at the San Diego Library in May, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at ICA San Diego in September. Taylor Chapin lives and works in San Diego.
Quint Gallery, established in 1981, is San Diego's leading gallery exhibiting and selling contemporary art. Over the past 40 years the gallery has presents more than 400 exhibitions of local, national, and international artists. Unlike traditional contemporary art galleries, Quint does not represent a limited group of artists but rather seeks out opportunities to show a wide variety of artists, thereby bringing a much richer sampling of contemporary art to San Diego. As the art world and art market have evolved over recent years, with a new emphasis on art fairs and the introduction of social media, online auctions and the advent of NFTS, artists, galleries, and collectors are all benefitting from more open, transparent access to works of art.
Our mission at Quint Gallery is to embrace this emerging art world structure in order to continue to bring the best in contemporary art to San Diego.