Seriously Playful: Featuring Joe Davidson, David S. Rubin, Scott Taylor

 LAUNCH Gallery is proud to present Seriously Playful, an exhibition of sculptures by Joe Davidson, drawings by David S. Rubin, and paintings by Scott Taylor. Working in different mediums, the Los Angeles-based artists share an interest in building upon art historical traditions to create new forms that are at once serious yet whimsical or quirky. 

Joe Davidson draws inspiration from contemporary sculptors who were in part influenced by Surrealism, including Eva Hesse, Piero Manzoni, and Robert Gober, and Tony Cragg. Like these artists, Davidson experiments with various materials, explores new or unusual processes, and embraces imagery that can be ambiguous or seem uncanny. He is particularly drawn to familiar mundane objects, such as the balloons he used as molds for the stacked plaster and resin works currently on view. According to the artist, “Each balloon is filled with tinted plaster and, as they harden, they sag on top of each other as gravity pulls them down. They are in one take playful and humorous, while at the same time heavy and bulbous. The pieces mimic both the color and shapes of balloons that have lost some of their air and are past their prime.” 

David S. Rubin practices automatic drawing—drawing spontaneously with no specific composition in mind—on a daily basis. As a graduate student in the 1970s he conducted extensive research into the relationship between Surrealist automatism and the origins of Abstract Expressionism. At that time he interviewed the Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford, who limited his formal vocabulary to only lines, circles, and dots because he felt they were the fastest forms an artist can make and, thus, the most truly “automatic.” Rubin’s new automatic drawings, which use primarily lines and circles, incorporate a visual language of personal spiritual symbols: cellular forms that he calls “pearls of wisdom,” candles, which represent blessings or prayers, DNA chains that signify continuity of humanity through the ages, and hybrids of chains and halos. Rubin, who favors a playful, uplifting aesthetic, calls the current series “Hope” because the symbols all signify aspects of hopefulness, something the artist believes can help us through these difficult times. 

Scott Taylor, who works as a lighting technician at The Getty Center, is exhibiting selections from two recent series, “Abstractions” and “Chandeliers,” both of which began as investigations of colored light. In the former series, Taylor creates intuitively invented worlds where prismatic three-dimensional forms refract light to emit rainbow-like sequences. The latter series reveals his interest in fragmented light, which he calls “split light spectrums.” For this body of work he chose the subject of chandeliers because he views them as nebulous and malleable. In an effort to keep his imagery strange and unpredictable, Taylor begins each composition in this series with an AI-prompted image that he then develops by hand into its final form. Stylistically, he considers his influences to include Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism. 

Joe Davidson holds a BFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has actively been exhibiting his sculpture since 2001 and has solo exhibitions at Barbara Davis Gallery, Houston; Tartar Gallery, Toronto; Daf Na Gallery, Naples, Italy; Jill Thayer Fine Art, Bakersfield; and Lawrence Asher Gallery, Gallery 825, and Garboushian Gallery, all in Los Angeles. He has participated in over 100 group exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and elsewhere. Davidson is a member of Durden and Ray, a collective of artist/curators who work together to create exhibition opportunities at their downtown L.A. gallery as well as in concert with artist groups and gallery spaces around the world. His sculptures are represented in both corporate and private collections. 

David S. Rubin has a distinguished track record as a curator, critic, and artist. For almost forty years, he worked as a contemporary art curator at encyclopedic museums, contemporary art centers, and college art galleries. He began his career in 1977 as Assistant Director of the Galleries of the Claremont Colleges and Assistant Professor of Art History at Scripps College. This was followed by curatorial positions at Santa Monica College; San Francisco Art Institute; Freedman Gallery at Albright College in Reading, PA.; MOCA Cleveland (then known as Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art); Phoenix Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; and San Antonio Museum of Art. His curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Over the years Rubin has published numerous exhibition catalogs and books and he is currently a contributor to Hyperallergic and Visual Art Source. His writings also appear in Arts, Art in America, ArtScene, Artillery, Artweek, Fabrik, and Glasstire. Rubin has been exhibiting his automatic drawings since 2003 and has had solo exhibitions at California State University Art Galleries, Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Barrister’s Gallery, New Orleans, and at Dock Space Gallery, R Gallery, and High Wire Arts in San Antonio. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Tenri Cultural Institute, New York; Artist Commune, Hong Kong; Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas State University; and smaller venues in New Orleans, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. Rubin’s drawings are represented in the collections of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Bradbury Art Museum, Arkansas State University. 

Scott Taylor studied art at the North Carolina School of the Arts and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before earning a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from Rutgers University. He has had solo exhibitions at V & A Gallery, New York; Kim Iocovozzi Gallery, Savannah; Jersey City Museum Project Space; Thunderbolt Gallery, Jersey City; Skid Row Museum and Archive, Los Angeles; and Vita Art Center, Ventura. Taylor has participated in groups exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and at other venues in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Austin, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. He currently works as a lighting technician on the installation crew at The Getty Museum, Los Angeles.