Taylor Thomas — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Taylor Thomas

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @created.by.taylor

Blue Tuesday; Corpus 4, 2024 – 2025

Taylor Thomas’s Blue Tuesday and Corpus 4 investigate how public and private notions of Blackness and the Black family are represented and reproduced via film and television media. Through painting, collage, and sculpture, Thomas calls attention to the fallacies of entertainment media’s claims to fully capture identities. Thomas instead references the spaces between legibility and abstraction that might inspire connection. This space where images break down might offer more honest sites for connection than a simulacrum of photographic or cinematic realism. Sourced from personal photo archives and industry trade publications, Blue Tuesday further questions how external visual codes influence Black interiority. The color palette interpolates television color bars — those standardized hues used to calibrate broadcast equipment — suggesting how Blackness has been technically processed, adjusted, and transmitted through media systems. Chrome and pixelation abstract source material from personal to public, referencing larger systems that have struggled to “accurately” represent Blackness. Corpus 4 combines collage with sculpture on a black plinth, draping paper and metal rings over ceramic forms that evoke bodily presence. By using visual tools including chrome surfaces and pixelation — technologies associated with image transmission and degradation — Thomas makes visible how representational systems mediate and distort Black identity, creating spaces where legibility breaks down into abstraction.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025