A STONE’S THROW
Taylor Loftin & Kat Richards
3.21.2022-4.10.2022
To be close and heavy, light and far. Is it a hole? Or a gateway?
Using different techniques of cutting and layering, Taylor Loftin and Kat Richards create saturated spaces that pulse between depth and flatness. In Loftin’s paintings, the intricate cutting of painted canvas, paper, and his grandparents’ playing cards creates a woven thicket of familial memory. In Richards’s prints, a monoprint stencil technique is used to deconstruct the body, and then rebuild it into a queer reality in which form and space are as boundless as the luminous gradients and color fields they achieve on the paper’s surface.
Both artists, who happen to have connections to Fayetteville, Arkansas, develop optically and metaphorically layered spaces. Building abstraction through index, they accumulate shape and body part, artifact and handwriting, to create environments that vibrate and hum. This index is also a source for the narrative and the mythological. For Loftin, mythology is a way of creating a language for personal history and family memory. For Richards, it is a way to imagine new futures.
Kat Richards [they/them] is a print-media based artist. They received their MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA in 2019. Kat has exhibited nationally and internationally in locations that include, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Los Angeles, CA, and Stockholm, SE. They were a Resident Fellow at Anderson Ranch in 2019, Queer Material Labs, 2020, and Vermont Studio Center 2020. Kat has taught and been a visiting artist at various institutions that include, Women’s Studio Workshop, University of the Arts, and the University of Kansas. Currently, they are a Post-MFA Technical Fellow at the University of Arkansas.
Kat’s relationship with print media is an extension of their queerness, gender, and body. The printing press is an essential aspect of their work, acting, theoretically, as a genderless prosthetic for reproduction. They use an index of shapes and color as metaphors for a boundless and ever-changing figure.
Taylor Loftin (he/him) is a painter from Jackson, Mississippi, with a focus on abstraction and non-linear, story-telling. Loftin explores the ways family history shapes his relationships to love, labor, religion, regional traditions, and art. Through conversations and collaborations with family members, painting becomes a tool for strengthening familial bonds and shifting one’s self-perception. Loftin received his BFA from Memphis College of Art in 2015 and his MFA from the University of Arkansas in 2021. He is a 2019 alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Drawing and is the recipient of the 2020 William & Dorothy Yeck Award for Young Painters.
A Stone’s Throw installation images
