Taglialatella Galleries will be the next stop for the vaunted WEST tour, an exciting collection of original paintings by British contemporary artist Russell Young. First exhibited at the Modern Art Museum in Shanghai, China - followed by Marfa, TX and Los Angeles, CA - WEST will make its way to Taglialatella’s flagship location in the Chelsea arts district for its New York City debut.
WEST taps into primal instincts and grandiose American dreams. Living and painting on what Young calls the “edge of America,” this body of work looks upon wide open vistas and imagery aimed to expand understandings of freedom, danger, and possibility.
The journey towards these vistas begins in the anamorphic widescreens of Western films that Young watched growing up in Northern England. These fantasies eventually led him to America, where he has roamed ever since, unafraid to embody a land full of contradictions.
In WEST, Young both venerates and pulls apart “Wild West'' mythology to reveal the many prisms that underscore the particularly American need for reinvention even when it sacrifices truth. Young makes no such sacrifice; instead he holds all the things we choose to love and choose to erase in equal measure.
The series features imagery, references, and obsessions of Young’s own world built within the larger framework of the American drama. The spaghetti westerns he watched in his youth, NASCAR racers before they were safely regulated, 70s big wave Hawaiian surf photography, California girls, Hells Angels, nickel plated revolvers, bison, rodeos, the Marlboro Cowboy before he was commercialized into oblivion, Native American chiefs before they, too, were almost driven into oblivion—they all debut in Young’s quest to confront and interrogate the idealization of the American Southwest.
The breadth of this ever-expanding body of work is matched only by Young’s impulse to venture into the deserts and forests and oceans of America, to go as far west as possible.
I am rain, horses, whiskey,
murder, chaos, terror, gasoline,
lust, heartbreak, damnation, love, Hollywood, lost, paranoia, horror, violence, redemption, rattlesnakes, sage, desert, raven, rolling thunder, Hells Angel, cowboys, girls,
rustlers, riot, cold wind,
the Pacific and dust and death and God. West.
We invite you to join us for an opening reception on April 28th at Taglialatella Galleries, from 6 - 8 pm, at 229 10th Ave. Please RSVP to the gallery reception by contacting Taglialatella Galleries at (212) 367-0881 or email info@djtfa.com.
Russell Young
by Taylor Garcia Dickson
It is often those born without a history who feel most compelled to explore it. This is one explanation for artist Russell Young's obsession with the American Southwest. Young was adopted. He has a vague knowledge of his possible ancestry but as he sees it, there is little for him to know or tell. He does not dwell on it, rather he is empowered to create without it.
Over the past six decades, he has made his own singular story. Through vision and ambition, he has managed to create a successful artistic career from nothing. To find home he felt compelled to go as far west as he could, ending up on the California coast, where he lives on a hillside close to the Pacific. He travels often but never feels too far away.
Young is an artist with no familial chronicles to line the shelves of his internal and external libraries, no ancestral imprints to care for, and so he has evolved without obstacles to become the voluntary keeper and interpreter of some of the most captivating and subversive images ever recorded. He holds space in his multimedia practice for the collection of some of the most spectacular images, orphaned without provenance, that float through Americana history.
His is the act of the modern-day explorer. One that travels to investigate the semi-neglected pasts of people and cultures who challenge civilised narratives: native American chiefs and tribes whose stories have been destroyed or rewritten; lost cowboys who roam the Wild West their fates unknown; wannabe actresses on the west coast reinventing themselves over and over again making it impossible to intuit their origin. All are outsiders, tragic figures, disparate, lost and powerful.
Young has nothing to lose in adopting the visual histories of the frequently overlooked and mystical parts of the Western world. He offers transcendence by bonding his artistic history to that of others who have been given names they did not choose, forced to conform, adapt, and/or be forgotten. With an inquisitive and unfettered lens Russell Young's practice reinvents the hyper-masculine and opaque feminine worlds that his found photographs manage to catch and release. When he discovers an image that pulls him in, he devours it, appropriates it, alters, colours, warps, translates and transforms it to such an extent it becomes something new entirely. In his work, we see the magnetic purpose of a wandering soul to create and connect lost things and people, and through this act, release infinite layers of meaning out into the multiverse.
Taylor Garcia Dickson is a native Mexican-American writer, consultant, creative director and real estate agent. She has worked in the international art world for over a decade. Most recently, she was the Director of the Dennis Hopper Art Trust in Los Angeles from 2012 to 2015, and the Membership Development Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona.