5.7.12 Champneys Taylor …something is going on around here, 2011
“…something is going on around here” (2012, films stills on photomural substrate) is a meditation on interrelationships within art space contexts. It consists of nine small prints of stills from Woodstock (the film). Woodstock (the festival) was a DIY commercial venture which became free only when it was evident that far more people were going to attend than the proprietors had planned for. The stills are taken from the first six minutes of the film. During montages which expose the setup of the event (arrival of performers and audience, stage setup, environmental impact, etc.), the soundtrack is the Crosby Stills and Nash performance “Long Time Gone.” This song contains the line “…something is going on around here.”
I’ve had a long-standing interest in music performance films both for their aestheticisms and their functions as cultural-historical markers. The 9 stills presented in this project reflect my interest in subjecting and perhaps reducing these aestheticisms and historical markers to ‘ready-made’ status. I am less interested in viewers’ interpretation of or derivation of meaning (though I encourage both) from the series of stills than in the notion and reality that they will displayed in an art gallery. As a painter I am interested in presenting images which work together by virtue of aesthetic considerations and context. This project maintains that interest, this time within the context of images which are not my own.
Champneys ‘Champ’ Taylor was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1970 and lives in Washington, DC. Taylor is a 2012 fellow at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VCCA). Between 2005 and 2007 he regularly exhibited work at Cynthia Broan (New York City). His video work was screened at the Armand Hammer Auditorium in 2006 and 2007 as part of the Washington Project for the Arts “Experimental Media” series. In 2000, Taylor co-founded the artists’ collective Decatur Blue, with which he showed works at galleries and art spaces in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Miami Beach, until 2005. He attended NYU Steinhardt, during which he studied in Venice Italy, and received a Masters in Studio Art in 2004. His work has been exhibited in group shows at Transformer (DC), Millennium Arts Center (DC), Civilian Art Projects (DC), a two-person show at Salve Regina Gallery, Catholic University, and a recent (2011) solo show