Anita Taylor: Moonraker: Solo exhibiton, Vision Art Platfom, Istanbul

Exhibition Dates: 29 November 2024 - 15 March 2025
Exhibition Venue: Vision Art Platform, Istanbul, Turkey

This solo exhibition, curated by Firat Arapoğlu for Vision Art Platform, presents c30 artworks and takes its title from the latest series by Taylor, Moonrakers. This series explores the act and context of being a witness or observer of impactful, yet duplicitous, incidents through narrative and visual language. A key painting, Moonrakers (2024), gestated during the global pandemic (in Taylor’s Wiltshire studio) with the resultant large monochrome works evoking history paintings. This image, and others, reflected a sense of impotence at ‘looking on’ as events unfolded, suspended in time, but obscured from full view (in isolation). Alluding to temporary structures, interim sites of care and occupation that proliferated, these curtained spaces imply an impermanence and touch on the veiling of the ‘behind the scenes’ acts that transpire in human tragedies across history. The title comes from the tale of 16thC ‘moonrakers’, or smugglers caught retrieving hidden contraband from a [Wiltshire] pond by moonlight who pretend to be trying to ‘rake in’ a cheese - the reflection of the moon – and are dismissed as buffoons. In the first painting, a reflection of the moon implies a skull, a visual doubling that also ripples throughout this image and the subsequent drawing-paintings in the series and refers to large drawings of skulls (2022) made in response to the finds at the Neolithic site of Asikli Höyük, during lockdown*. As bystanders to the precarity of human experience, these depictions express the sense, and act, of being witness to cyclical displacement and/or duplicity; located somewhere between arrival and departure, fact and fiction, memory and forgetting. Taking visual cues from her ink drawings, these works uniquely expand and translate as large-scale fluid drawings exploring notions of duality through their visual language and motifs as much as their narrative, theatrical devices. Set in the context of an eariler series, A mon seul désir, this major exhibiton reflects on the current and recent research by Taylor through painting and drawings.