ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Using fiber, charcoal, clay, and text, taylor barnes’ work reveals themes of race, identity, and social critique. Heavily informed by history and language, her practice is as equally inspired by oral history and critical writers as it is by visual artists. Charcoal being her primary method of making depicts gestural figures and non-representational forms in rich texture. The lush ephemerality of the dark medium imbues an uncontrollable nature into the works, as the textile substrate concurrently calls to mind past modes of historical record and narration.

In Holding On to Elsewhere, barnes considers the positions of Black women within white spaces. Here, she presents notions of voyeurism, the gaze, and the power of choice. Non- representational forms appear and function as portals, as the figures and vessels become visual metaphors of the spiritual presences and experiences. The ambiguity of the figures and their expressions of refusal contribute to an intentional complication of discrete roles of ‘object and subject’.

Although barnes has not previously exhibited her ceramics, she has long used the medium as inspiration. She has created a language with sculptural vessels, which are reflected in her two- dimensional works. In Holding on to Elsewhere, barnes will present her ceramics for the first time in an installation alongside the charcoal on cloth works.

Austin curator and writer Phillip Townsend writes, “Body, space, and memory form a kind of trilogy that bears itself out in barnes’ ongoing exploration of the material world and the transcendental.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

taylor barnes was born in 1993 in Austin, Texas. In 2019, she received an MFA in Fibers from the University of North Texas, where she earned two BFAs in 2015 for both Ceramics and Fibers and served as a Teaching Assistant and Fellow. She has exhibited solo shows at Erin Cluley Gallery, UNT on the Square, Denton Black Film Festival, 500X Gallery, and at Big Medium in Austin, TX, running concurrently with her outdoor installation for Round 14 of the Cage Match Project outside The Museum of Human Achievement.

barnes has received awards such as the Dallas Museum of Art’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund Award in 2021, the Sylvia Hougland Emerging Artist Award for Make Art With Purpose 2020, and multiple art focused scholarships throughout her education. Her work has been featured on platforms such as Dallas Contemporary and Big Medium in the form of digitally recorded artist talks, and in publications such as Glasstire, KERA, and The Dallas Morning News. barnes currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.

ABOUT PHILLIP A. TOWNSEND

Phillip Townsend is the Curator of Art at Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Art + Art History specializing in modern and contemporary art of the African Diaspora with a focus on the politics of identity and representational strategies of self-identified Black artists. He received his M.A., in Art History from UT-Austin (2016) and his B.A., in Art History from The University of South Florida (2014).

As a founding member of the Austin-based curatorial collective, Neon Queen Collective, Phillip co-curated Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos–Pons (2018) at the Christian Green Gallery and Like the Lonely Traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena Campos–Pons (2018) at the Visual Arts Center. Phillip also co-curated Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift (2019), an exhibition presented by the Blanton Museum in partnership with African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) and the Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at The University of Texas at Austin. He contributed several essays for the exhibition catalogue, Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift. Mostly recently, Phillip curated Adrian Armstrong: “with new eyes…” (2021) an exhibition mounted at the Idea Lab, that explored the intersection of traditional portraiture and representations of Black people.