The Hole is pleased to present As you weren’t, Taylor White’s New York solo debut. The exhibition will be open to the public from Tuesday, September 3rd with the opening celebration on Saturday, September 7th from 6–8pm. With ten paintings and a wall of works on paper, the show brings the intensity: combining spray paint, oil stick, crayon, acrylic and oil paint, White’s chosen medium is ultimately repetition.

Drawing on canvas and paper he creates tense, cartoonish imagery, layering error and edit, with a result something closer to a GIF or animation clip. Starting his process with rapid oil stick drawings, the haste and the anxiety is preserved in the large canvasses. Toes are tapping and teeth are chattering, while faces with too many eyeballs and mouths are panting in anticipation.

As if he were working with a time limit—as in a game of Pictionary—White seems to be depicting everyday objects as quickly as possible to an audience on the edge of their seats. In Navigation, green or Navigation, red, we are presented with feet, feet!; in High vibration, night we are being shown a house, drawn over a few times with insistence.

I’m a huge fan of stupidity: I view the term positively, and when I see it in art, it is high praise. Like ‘That’s so stupid I love it’. I really like that sense of freedom and absurdity that is possible in the art world.

White is a fan of both stupidity and a whiff of the apocalyptic, à la Cormac McCarthy, the tightrope teetering between humor and doom. We see goofy, sinister smiles in his canine and human protagonists: in “Both Dogzzz” the razor teeth are funny and violent, in Trifocus, above, the smile is crazed, deranged, but probably harmless.

The title of this exhibition is a nod to White’s time in the military, and an invitational wink to keep doing things the wrong way. He began making art relatively late in life at 35, untainted by art school or the gallery world’s incubation of emerging artists. His two kids are his most important critics, without notions of right and wrong or lines you aren’t supposed to cross.

Taylor White (b. 1978, San Diego) lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions include Meat Dream at L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Instructions for Remaining Upright at Marquee Projects, NY and Invisible Cities at Roberts Projects, LA. White has also been featured in fairs including Taipei Dangdai, KIAF Seoul, and Art Busan with G. Gallery.