View from A Friend’s Phone: A Conversation with Pace Taylor
By TANNON RECKLING
Pace Taylor (they/them) and I engage in correspondence about their current studio practice below. I found comfort in Pace’s pastel renderings of perceived anxieties and kinship, especially during isolation periods within 2020. Which came at a time when other artists and art spaces seemed to completely ignore the systemic material conditions we were, and are, experiencing in their work. Pace’s artwork came at a time when relationships with oneself and the world, surprisingly intimate and quiet at times, came into questions still being sorted in 2021 and probably onward. Pace is an artist who is “emotionally preoccupied with intimacy,” as they say in their biography. Their work often deals with lived experiences and knowledge of a queer, non-binary, and neurodivergent sensibility. Small moments on screens and other encounters within larger systemic oppressions are captured within Pace’s visual work. These moments are relatable to today’s average contemporary viewer: feelings of being “connected but alone.” Pace’s more detailed rendering of faces and hands, often depicted within bright, saturated pastels, often softens the subject matter sensibility’s blow. This ambiguousness is not uncomfortable, but it embodies a sense of the quotidian.
I first engaged with Pace’s work through social media during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Now in late 2021, Pace’s work resonates with me as a fellow neurodivergent queer person who’s burnout and fed up with continued institutional strife in our #newnormal. I am excited to discuss their current practice in 2021 and their work within Tropical Contemporary’s ongoing Transformation Residency which provides funds and platforms to trans and gender-nonconforming artists in Oregon. I am thankful for their kindness, earnestness about labor and for taking the time to briefly exchange with me as we all go into another day and do our best.
the sun sets, holding, 2021, soft pastel and graphite on paper, 76”x50”
TR: What have you been thinking about in your work recently?
PT: Something that keeps coming up for me is the concept of translation. Translation from thought to image, from feeling to language, from hand to tool to mark. In September, I spent approximately fifty hours making little graphite marks that turned into the hands of people holding others. At times it felt at odds with the sentiment of intimacy to re-create these images of momentary touch through this intensely tedious, both physically and mentally, method of production, but my language of connection and intimacy is all of those things. Through an Autistic lens (which feels inextricable from my existence as a queer person), I am re-making these images as both a means of investigation, both of others’ experiences with connection (romantic, platonic, etc.) and my own.
The question I keep asking myself, though, is, do I want the metaphorical text to be legible? Who is this for? I often think my practice is selfish. I make these images to understand what I’m feeling or experiencing and sometimes just feel something. There is a sensory pull to mark-making and color-picking, and I perform these skills and passions to exalt myself. Of course, I hope that others can relate, but I do my work for me first. My thoughts can be quite inscrutable to myself at times, so this translation process feels crucial. And I think that’s pretty human of me.
Image from a 2020 show at Third Room Project in Portland, OR, with artist Francis Dot.
TR: Is there a specific material that you are attracted to using in your artistic practice? If so, what is it about that material that you find appealing?
PT: As much as I struggle with the realities of being a soft pastel artist, I can’t stay away! It’s horribly messy, and working on paper can be an absurdly delicate process, not to mention the difficulties of displaying the finished work. Still, I love how alive it is as a material. I came to soft pastel as an extension of pencil drawing. I didn’t study fine art in school, so I am very much a self-taught fine artist, and when I actively started making art a few years ago, I leaned into drawing because it was what I had been doing, somewhat passively, my whole life. It was familiar but had endless space to evolve. I don’t know what the rules are, and that’s as exciting as it is frustrating.
It was a bit of a lesson in patience to remove the color from the work—especially work I was doing during Tropical Contemporary’s residency. Color feels very immediate to me; it’s a way of expressing feelings in very clear visual language, or at least a familiar one. Removing pastel and just working with pencil on paper felt like more of a slow burn, and the tension is only released when all of the drawings exist together—an emotional map with an ever-changing key.
TR: What's a queer memory that has influenced your practice? Do notions of queer community (it exists in so many ways) come into your practice?
PT: I had gone on HRT back in 2014 for a handful of months, thinking at the time that I identified as a trans man. It got to a point, about half a year on T, that this conception I had of myself started to crumble. I realized that this binary idea of gender I had didn’t fit, and I stopped hormones. I had to take a really hard look at myself and my relationship to my body and how it’s perceived in the world. I knew I was still trans, but I couldn’t sort out what it meant to not be on either side of the gender binary. Simply put, I felt like a freak. I felt like my body had betrayed me. I didn’t know any non-binary people at the time, and I hadn’t even heard the word for how I felt. While non-binary identities have always existed, finding information about them on the internet in 2014 was difficult, and when I started searching online for examples of other people who had similar experiences. The first online communities I encountered were based on TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) rhetoric. There were threads of that malignant way of thinking that touched me in the form of a kind of subconscious self-hatred. Those feelings lingered until I found other non-binary people, first in books (Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, compiled by S. Bear Bergman and Kate Bornstein, Gender Failure by Ivan Coyote and Rae Spoon, and the seminal text Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg, and more), and then in my communities.
TR: What has been an interpretation of queerness in another aesthetic form that you have thought about often?
PT: I find the horror genre and aesthetic to be especially fertile ground for queer sentiment and reflection, especially when camp is involved. Horror so readily lends itself to the idea of becoming. Werewolves, zombies, vampires, etc. are all about becoming something unknown, something secret and then giving yourself over to it. It’s transformation - body horror. As a trans person who has gone on hormones and then stopped, and who might go on again, I have a difficult time reconciling what my body was and is and might be, and as embarrassed as I am of this reaction, I’ve been genuinely afraid of and repulsed by my body at times. So in a bit of a backwards way, to witness gruesome or horrific body transformations so lovingly depicted on screen has been validating to my experience. And as for the intersection of Camp and Horror, as Susan Sontag writes in her essay Notes on Camp (1964), camp taste is finding success in “passionate failures”. If that’s not the queer experience, I don’t know what is!
The Passenger’s Side, 2021, soft pastel and graphite on paper, 30”x22.”
Pace Taylor (they/them) is an artist emotionally preoccupied with intimacy, and who we choose to share it with. Their work is often quiet, very queer, and eternally vulnerable. Taylor lives in Portland, OR. They received their BFA in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon (2015), and have since shown their work regionally, including at Upfor, Disjecta, Nationale, Wieden + Kennedy, Stephanie Chefas Projects, and Third Room Gallery. Taylor is represented by Nationale in Oregon
Tannon A Reckling (they/he) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, and creative organizer living and working between the unceded lands of Kalapuya Ilihi and Lenapehoking. They received their MFA from the University of Oregon in 2021 and previously studied at the University of California- Los Angeles in 2017. They are interested in: tremulous digital materialisms, shadow labor, and queer semiotics. They hope you're having a good day.