The hits keep coming… Deborah McLeod, art reviewer for C-Ville Weekly, has written another illuminating and insightful review of Migration's current exhibit of Tim Taunton's paintings called "Through the Looking Glass." Here is what Deborah saw:
Through a mirror, darkly
Life is strange. It is the human condition to believe that it isn't going to be - it's going to just be normal. But thanks to myriad little agendas, paranoias, psychoses, gullibilities, superstitions, love, loss and loneliness, it just goes on, fascinatingly and disturbingly peculiar.
Tim Taunton's surreal, grotto-style paintings offer outright evidence of this. The works in "Through the Looking Glass" are intimate images of existential situations: Miniature, exquisitely rendered protagonists stand in the midst of some vast place, minimally defined by a landmark or two—a Greek ruin or a geological formation - always brightly illuminated by a benign cerulean sky, which offers a somewhat inexact sense of Divine Providence. And while Taunton may exaggerate the circumstances - and the outfits - just a little, his color-saturated, pared down, shoebox-sized psychological landscapes attain an unsettling déjà vu quality.
Each forsaken place threatens to be rather frightening, but Taunton protects viewers from his characters' isolation through constricted vertical gateways into each scene, not to mention a few odd costumes. Whether decked out as a harlequin, a bride, or ready to rocket into space under an aerodynamic funnel hat, their clothing conveys their charming individuality and chutzpah. They seem pretty much O.K. with their threatening circumstances; they are the dreamers who composed these places.
Taunton seems particularly interested in division and equilibrium. The realm of the sky balances the volume and clutter of the earth; vertical figures are often balanced by a horizontal shadow; and some scenes are cut precisely in two by a monolith. Doorways divide one space from another, just as the picture's wide entrance divides us from Taunton's narrative. These splits make the images feel a little static and contrived, but that's kind of the point of the surrealistic gamers, who have always had an interest in toying with and halting time. Most important, Taunton's paintings maintain an almost perfect equilibrium between mild tragedy and dark humor.
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