Exhibition at University of Georgia

Documentation from solo-exhibition titled
The Stands
at University of Georgia's Circle Gallery
exhibition images:
selected photography from exhibition,:
College of Environment and Design, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
Artist Statement from
The Stands
I was raised in Ohio, in a family not unlike many in my home State and the Southeast. We were fiercely loyal to our local football team and were regular church goers. I spent many weekends sitting on the bleacher and on the pew. Both venues harbored potent experiences of reverence, jubilation, disappointment, and relief. As my passion for art-making grew, so did my interest in these past experiences. I found these two environments held many parallels and began to construct work that was related to these places.
In the summer of 2014, I moved to Huntsville Alabama and shortly after, received a travel grant aimed at documenting places of spectatorship throughout the Southeast. The end goal was to create a new body of work inspired by these travels. When I initially hit the road, I found each town was littered with dozens of churches, all requiring a lengthy process of door knocking and phone calling just to get inside. Conversely most small town football stadiums were open public environments. Because of their accessibility and their relative collective uniformity, football stands became one of the focal points of these trips.
The work included in this exhibition, The Stands, is a mixture of photo documentation from these recent travels and the beginning drawings and sculpture created as a direct result of this documentation. Stadium maps, megaphones, rural visitor stands, the eye-in-the-sky blimp, TV-ready multicolored bleachers and the revival tent are vocabulary brought into this space. In many ways the photo documentation has become my own image database where I have begun to pluck ideas about form, color, line, and content as I create new work. While I have not included my entire creative process in this exhibition, I do hope students can see how one artist processes visual information from an environment to create a body of work.
©Christopher B Taylor