Buffalo native Rodney Taylor's recent series of paintings, on view in Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor at Albright-Knox Northland, was inspired by houses surrounding the artist’s studio and home on Fillmore Avenue.
Taylor often painted these structures as ghostly shells, exposing as vulnerable those spaces in which we might expect to feel safest. These images confront us with what we regularly see but rarely acknowledge: the burden, unequally distributed in an environment of increasingly stark economic disparity, of maintaining what ought to be a space of sanctuary and shelter.
Rodney Taylor (American, 1969–2019). Untitled, Home Series #2, 2019. Flashe paint, earth clay, water, pencil, and pastel on Lennox 100 paper; 60 x 55 1/4 inches (152.4 x 140.3 cm). Courtesy of the artist's estate. Photograph by Brenda Bieger.
Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor is dedicated to Taylor, who passed away in December 2019, and his wife, Annette Daniels Taylor, their two daughters, Mingus and Bleu-Ruby, and their two sons, Haven and Winter Sky.
