KARYN TAYLOR

Experimental Physics

Opening - Wednesday October 14th, 5.30-6.30pm

Sanderson are delighted to present the exhibition Experimental Physics by Kāryn Taylor

Experimental Physics

By Dina Jezdić

Our senses construct a shallow shoreline of perception, completely blind to the vast, quantum depths where reality builds its foundations. Our experience informs us that a table is solid, that a circle is perfectly round and that a sunset is beautiful, yet our access to reality is never entirely unmediated. In his allegory of the cave, Plato used the image of prisoners confined underground, able to see only shadows cast onto a wall, to explore the difference between appearance and reality and the limits of what we can know through our senses. Having never seen the objects that produce the shadows, the prisoners mistake them for reality itself. The allegory offers a powerful reminder that what we perceive may be only a partial account of what exists. At the quantum scale, matter behaves in ways that bear little resemblance to the solid, stable world we experience. There remains a persistent gap between what we know and what we can perceive.

For more than two decades, Kāryn Taylor has explored the space between reality and our limited understanding of the world. Working with geometric abstraction, light, colour and movement, the artist creates situations where the familiar begins to behave unexpectedly. In Experimental Physics, this inquiry takes on a new dimension: through an animated installation, a series of sculptural works and a sequence of light boxes, extending her investigation by questioning the assumptions that underpin our experience of physical reality. Taylor expands the traditional premise of drawing, allowing the line to move through time and occupy a space that exceeds the physical boundaries of the object. The works draw us in through familiar geometric forms, while subtly shifting our confidence in what we think we see. Circles and squares suggest order and certainty, but changing light and colour make that certainty obscured, revealing perception itself as something contingent and conditional. Through playful process and geometry that provides an apparent logic, Taylor presents us with abstract ideas and physically seductive art, where mass, weight and presence become fluid.

Language operates similarly - the French philosopher Jacques Derrida's famous claim that "there is nothing outside the text" points to the ways language and culture shape how we encounter the world. Although the world exists independently of us, we experience it through systems of meaning that give what we see significance. A sunset exists whether or not we name it but describing it as beautiful draws on ideas of beauty shaped by history, culture and language. Seeing is thus never neutral; we are always layering our experience through what we already know.

Taylor is not proposing that reality is unknowable, nor that perception is meaningless. She is interested in the space in-between where together we can experience curiosity. This is ultimately what makes Experimental Physics so compelling. By searching for a space where forms remain open, the artworks precede interpretation.

Experimental Physics is a challenge to question what we think we know. More importantly it's an invitation to allow the absence of knowledge to create an opening and a space where meaning and possibilities can become endless.

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