SHADES OF PERCEPTION

Craig Dorety + Susie Taylor

PRESS RELEASE

ARTIST PRESS

ARTIST BIOS

ARTIST STATEMENTS

PRESS RELEASE

Johansson Projects presents work by Susie Taylor and Craig Dorety, two artists who love the experience of exploring the relationship of colors, how they affect one another, and us.

Craig Dorety’s pastel palettes are rich in celestial reference points and create a wonderfully updated language and landscape for abstraction. Concentric circles of kinetically colored space interact amongst peers and dance for us in ways that suggest movement, metamorphosis, and magic.

Susie Taylor‘s expert use of a loom allows her to explore ideas and interactions of translucency and opacity. Pattern and symmetry, saturation and color interaction. Her intersections of warp and weft create beautifully ordered systems that still flirt with chance, interruption, and improvisation.

Taylor and Dorety dive deep into their processes in producing sensual, other-worldly, and dimensional constructions. Their technical fascinations couldn’t be more distinct – Taylor finding proficiency on a loom while Dorety is awash in a landscape of ones and zeros. Taylor expresses in cotton thread, while Dorety finds his expression through light-emitting diodes. Both are applying their color mediums to a substrate in their search for the sublime. But regardless of how one viewer’s experience of color can be different from another’s, it is the way we enjoy our experience that speaks to our humanity and awareness of our being in the world.

Shades of Perception runs online on Artsy from September 19 – October 19, 2024. Link to view on Artsy.

For all inquiries, contact Johansson Projects at 510-444-9140 or info@johanssonprojects.com

ARTIST PRESS

Craig Dorety Press Links

Susie Taylor Press Links

ARTIST BIOS

Craig Dorety (b. 1973 in Oakland, CA) graduated from U.C. Davis in Mechanical Engineering with emphasis in Automation and Control Theory in 2006. Dorety builds custom electronics that express the complicated, bigger ideas he’s developed from experiencing occasional ocular migraines and also synesthesia. He has exhibited at the Thoma Foundation’s Art Vault (New Mexico), where his work resides in the foundation’s Digital and Media Art permanent collection. His work has also been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), the Orlando Museum of Art (Florida), the Knoxville Museum of Art (Tennessee), the Hunter Museum of American Art (Tennessee), and Johansson Projects (Oakland). He currently lives and works in Portland, OR.

Susie Taylor weaves abstract and dimensional textiles. She has exhibited her work across the U.S. as well as in international fiber art and contemporary textile biennials in China and Ukraine. Her solo and group exhibitions include Origin Stories and Hardcore Threadlore at Johansson Projects (Oakland); Altered Perceptions at ICA San Jose; Poetic Geometry at Textile Center Minneapolis; Material Meaning: A Living Legacy of Anni Albers at Craft in America Center (Los Angeles); Fiber Art: 100 Years of Bauhaus at Art Ventures Gallery (Menlo Park, CA); and Weaving At Black Mountain College: Anni Albers, Trude Guermonprez, and Their Students” at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, curated by Michael Beggs and Julie Thomson. Taylor is the recipient of a Handweavers Guild of America, Certificate of Excellence in Handweaving Level 1 and received an HGA Award for Beautiful Struggle at the National Fiber Direction 2015 at the Wichita Center for the Arts. She was awarded an HGA Award and the Innovation Award at Focus: Fiber 2014 at the Erie Art Museum. Other notable exhibitions include: Materials Hard and Soft, Greater Denton Arts Center, Fiber Arts VII, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, Eastern Michigan University Gallery, and New Voices in Weaving, Contemporary Crafts Gallery (Portland). Her work was recently acquired into the de Young Museum’s permanent collection (San Francisco) and has been published in The LA Times, American Craft, Fiberarts, FiberArt Now, The Textile Eye, Complex Weavers Journal, Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot, Handwoven, Journal of Weavers Spinners & Dyers and The Bulletin (Guild of Canadian Weavers) magazines.

ARTIST STATEMENTS

Craig Dorety:

We use our senses to help us understand our position in space-time. Vision is our main sensory input for the world we exist in. The human brain has some built-in limits beyond which it cannot properly interpret visual information. I use this limit to express the workings of the subconscious. Also embodied in my work is a sense of scientific realism; the elements and information of a natural system can be reduced and modulated and still exhibit characteristics of that natural system and to me this is proof that information is a true and robust representation of our universe. Clean lines, simple shapes, self-similarity on varying scales, and pure, changing color are my palette; information systems and data-sets are my subject matter.

I use mathematics and engineering to formulate physical space-time distortions: displaying static images through time while squeezing and folding the images’ space into 3-dimensional layers. Using industrially prefabricated LED technology and custom firmware, I collapse space and re-map it onto the time axis. By re-displaying information in this manner I give the viewer a glimpse into space-time as seen through my eyes. It’s an automatism whereby I fold my own perception of space-time in an effort to understand what it means to exist.

Susie Taylor:

Our culture is a rich fabric woven with metaphors that reflect our deepest needs and desires for connection. We strive to live in ‘tight knit communities’, ‘tie the knot’ in marriage, and seek those ‘cut from the same cloth’. We all have a fundamental need to feel connected to something larger than ourselves.

The world wide web promised a future of greater access to friends and family and yet many people find themselves starved for real connection. We put forward a curated impression of our lives on social media, while the messy, loose ends are hidden. We share fragments of ourselves but don’t reveal the whole picture leaving the imagination of others to fill in the rest.

The Swatch Series offers a visual metaphor for these fragmented experiences. Exaggerated weave structures suggest the endless repetition of patterns and connection in our lives. Each piece represents a small sample of our lives, a neighborhood or community that is part of a larger social fabric. These Swatches can be seen as symbolic remnants of a larger tapestry that at times feels threadbare.

Yet, within these fragments lies a positive message. In a world hungry for connection, this work serves as a reminder of the threads that bind us together. These Swatches showcase the fragmented nature of our experiences while suggesting a longing for the wholeness and unity that can be found through genuine connection with others. By elevating weave structure to the realm of art, the viewer is reminded of the beauty and meaning in the seemingly insignificant pieces of our lives while contemplating the visual metaphor of the interconnectivity of something larger than ourselves, an intricate tapestry of life.