Loring Taoka: vs

Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce vs, an exhibition of artworks by Loring Taoka. The show represents the fifth solo exhibition by the Pittsburgh-based artist at Galleri Urbane. 

Taoka’s work takes as its basis a pseudo-“X” shape, which the artist duplicates, layers, and takes apart until it dissolves, losing inherent meaning as a sequence of shapes while gaining abstract potential as the viewer is “forced to sit on the threshold, on that precipice of knowing versus not-knowing,” Taoka says.  

Taoka immerses the viewer in symmetries: the work hangs in deliberate sets, “conceptually engaging [the viewer] with being inside the space of a mirror, using that as a parallel to how I see myself versus how someone sees me as a queer person of color.”  

Brightly colored UV prints on plexiglass meld transparencies and hard edges. Opposite them, white impasto on white panel replicates the negative space of the plexiglass pattern, the surface itself proffering a game of subtle whites and grays that confounds spatial depth. On the other two walls, several fragile, matte gouache paintings on paper face, on the opposing wall, acrylic on panel in an almost visually unsettling union of pink and orange.  

The contrast of colors and surfaces elicits visceral responses. Taoka welcomes the push-pull, joining colors that force the viewer to respond, even recoil. “I’m [more] interested in challenging our notions of what is good or what is correct or what is proper,” Taoka says, rather than executing epitomes of harmony.  

Placing others and the self in a mirror requires dedicated unpacking and patience. The grid functions as the origin of pattern but also an embodiment of rigidity, and so Taoka likes “having [the works] fall off the grid or undo the grid in some way.” Embracing a practice of risk-taking, the exhibition, which unites more varied media than previous ones, revels in zones of ambiguity and challenges preconceived aesthetic notions and ideas of authenticity and truth. 

Also, it is a show of ravishing absence: both negative space and former versions of what a pattern was hold weight. Taoka thus conceptually and aesthetically expands the potential of an image, “what it could be, what it was, what it is,” as he says.  

Ultimately, vs deftly unites and extends the artist’s ongoing conceptual aims and plumbs the new possibilities of mirroring.    

Merge #1
acrylic on birch
36" x 36"
2023

Acid tongue #1
gouache on paper
15" x 15", 18" x 18" framed