Taylor, Pace. Title, date. 2022 Individual Artist Fellow, Oregon Arts Commission.
Originally published February, 2022
Pace Taylor is an artist emotionally preoccupied with intimacy and whom we choose to share it with. Pace lives and works in Portland. Their work is often quiet, very queer and persistently vulnerable. They received their bachelor of fine arts in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon (2015), and their work has been exhibited at Nationale, La Loma Projects, Oregon Contemporary (formerly Disjecta) and Third Room Project, among others. Pace is represented by Nationale. At its core, their work is about belonging, both as concept and feeling. As a queer artist, and as a trans artist, they have found comfort in re-constructing scenes from found photographs and populating a space outside of time with imagined community. But as an autistic artist, daily concerns of acceptance and communication bleed through. As their own unreliable narrator in social interactions, Pace has spent much of their life picking apart how it is that people find community as they often feel on the outside of it. In these drawings they are distilling years of being a witness, and sometimes a voyeur, to other’s relationships, breaking them down into mutable planes of soft pastel and the warmth and weight of graphite. Still, as a romantic, this preoccupation with intimacy includes dreaming up all the ways it can exist, and through these images they create a visual space that others can project into and be embraced; an offer to be held by another’s language.
Courtesy of the Oregon Arts Commission.
Artist Credit: Pace Taylor