Stephen Talasnik
Otherworldly: Select Drawings
Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole
14 December 2023 – 4 February 2024
Journal of Memory, 2023
Graphite on paper, 15 ½ x 58 ½ inches
Savant, 2013
Graphite on paper, 70 x 48 inches
Elusive Figure #1, 2022-2023
Graphite and ink on paper, 30 x 22 inches
TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY presents Otherworldly: Select Drawings, its first solo exhibition featuring drawings by New York-based artist Stephen Talasnik.
Featuring a substantive selection of black and white drawings spanning the last twenty-plus years of his career, this exhibition explores the pictorial achievements of an artist who has pushed technical drawing beyond mark making to an experience with, as Lebbeus Woods noted, “this power to fascinate, confound, and reveal.” Through Stephen Talasnik’s hand we experience an adventure into an imagined world at the intersection of drawing and building.
Stephen Talasnik’s drawings explore otherworldly landscape and objects that evoke childhood memories. “If there was ever a moment of divine inspiration, it would be the instance I saw the General Motors’ Futurama exhibition and the Panorama of the City of New York at the 1964 Fair,” said Talasnik. “A lifelong obsession with visionary architecture was established at the Fair and I started doing drawings and sculptures of future cities after wandering through the Pavilions.”
Originally from Philadelphia, Stephen Talasnik grew up in an urban neighborhood surrounded by oil refineries, a shipyard, a helicopter factory, and an airport, immersing him in the aesthetics of industrial building. He lived in a house that bordered a local creek, providing him an opportunity to unearth the past as he searched for fossils imbued with fictional narratives. He turned these experiences into a world explored through drawing with pencil and building complex structures from wood.
Stephen Talasnik has spent the better part of sixty years inventing the past and envisioning and documenting the future. His work is informed by time travel and myth-making, intrigued with the infrastructure of the urban environment. The work is, as the title of the exhibition indicates, otherworldly, suggesting a moment in time without providing absolute coordinates. Often defined as “Fictional Engineering”, he uses no system of measurement, relying on the aesthetics of intuition and invention.
Working in his Brooklyn studio and ever informed by intuitive engineering and the human form, Stephen Talasnik continues to explore the unlimited capacity of the fictional object and landscape. Seduced by a visionary’s mantra, he relies on his personal encyclopedia of experience to define an imagined world that explores the visual capacity of a self-defined beauty. Archeological in nature, the viewer is invited to examine a personalized lexicon; extracting clues but challenged to determine specific identity. Employing pencil or wood, Stephen Talasnik’s works must always suggest the unfinished yet complete.
Stephen Talasnik attended the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) where he studied Black and White theory with photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, who nurtured his passion for drawing. His graduate studies took him to Rome with the Tyler School of Art (MFA) where he drew both the human form and architecture from the Classical environment. After completing his formal studies, Stephen Talasnik moved to Tokyo where he spent three years. It was in Tokyo that a fascination with hand building re-emerged after studying the art of bamboo construction. Following his time in Japan, Stephen Talasnik spent ten years traveling through Asia, all while commuting to his studio in New York City. These seminal experiences inform Stephen Talasnik’s obsession with drawing and building landscapes and objects that defy time or place.
In 2010, Stephen Talasnik ventured into the world of land art, and has completed major installations at the Storm King Art Center (NY); the Tippet Rise Art Center (MO); the Denver Botanic Garden (CO); the Russel Wright Design Center (NY); and Architektur Galerie Berlin. Stephen Talasnik has maintained ongoing studio investigations while exhibiting internationally. His work has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY); the Albertina (Vienna); the British Museum (London); the National Gallery of Art (DC); the Pompidou Centre (Paris); and the Whitney Museum (NY) among others. Stephen Talasnik lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY
62 South Glenwood Street, Jackson, WY 83001
