The Press Release:
Angus Taylor, well known South African sculptor, will exhibit a body of new work in various media, entitled “DEDUCT” at the UJ Art Gallery from 5 to 26 July 2006.
Taylor works from the premise that deduction gathers a valid conclusion from a more general premise to a more specific. The process of induction involves drawing general conclusions based on a limited and specific inference. Thus, in a technocratic culture that favours simulation and speed over real-time relationships, people and things are reduced to quick-time taxonomies.
Deduction implies the opposite. To deduce involves reasoning from the general to the particular, underscoring the need to engage with culture in terms of its flexible morphology. In this body of work, Taylor attempts to peel away the surface of his art to explore its innards, forcing the viewer to engage with the process of art making.
He says in this regard: “Information overload causes the domination of inductive reasoning. I am presenting the sculpture or an idea in aspects, perspectives or in different mediums. By showing a sculpture in repetition but a variant with different defined parts or perspectives I am forcing the viewer to assemble the whole from different aspects. One gains access to the part in considering the whole. The collective defines the individual. For, in the words of Meyer Vaisman, ‘…there is nothing more meaningful than taking meaning apart’”.
In this way, the induction / deduction binary is conflated in Taylor’s work which, as a collection is both scopic and expansive. Together, his use of a traditional medium like bronze with the plastic form of LED lights pokes fun at old and new canons. This exhibition, in other words, plays with the cultural and art-historical tropes of meaning making in contemporary Africa.
Angus van Zyl Taylor was born in Hillbrow to a journalist father and mother trained in painting in 1970 and grew up in Johannesburg and the Vaal Triangle – Gauteng, South Africa.
He completed his BA in Fine Arts with honours at the University of Pretoria in 1996. After tutoring in drawing and sculpture at the UP, he ran the Ashanti art foundry from 1996 – 1997
Taylor started his own business and foundry, Dionysus Sculpture Works in 1998, and he still teaches part time at the University of Pretoria and the Open Window Art Academy
He acts as advisor to the Tshwane University of Technology and is predominantly involved in government, local government as well as private sector large scale commissions to fund and support the infrastructure of his own fine art sculpture
His work is included in collections of the Rand Merchant Bank, Sasol, the Universities of the Free State and Pretoria, Saronsberg and Spier wine estates as well as many other national and international private collections.
LECTURE/WALKABOUT: Saturday 15 July 2006: 10 00 – 12 00
You are invited to interact with the artist at this lecture and walkabout.
