John and June Allcott Gallery: taylor barnes, Weight of Light

About

Reception and artist conversation: October 29, 2026, 5:00 pm

Weight of Light is an exhibition of seven works by multidisciplinary artist taylor barnes, created during her year-long residency at West Orchid in Pine Lake, Georgia. Weight of Light considers the relationship between material, perception, and the ongoing process of becoming. Emerging from a period of experimentation and personal reflection, the works occupy an ambiguous space between painting and object. Neither fixed representations nor resolved compositions, the works function as thresholds—sites of transition where questions of origin, transformation, and self-possession remain open.

barnes approaches the canvas as a material structure rather than a passive surface. Through staining, layering, saturation, and the transformation of matter between solid and liquid states, she explores the physical and conceptual possibilities of charcoal. Materials shift, settle, resist, and respond, creating conditions in which chance, absence, and emergence become integral to the work. The works do not seek resolution through conventional notions of completion. Instead, they retain evidence of their making—gestures, interruptions, accumulations, and erasures that reveal the instability and possibility inherent in transformation. What remains visible is a record of decisions, encounters, and material negotiations. The works resist linear narratives of progress, suggesting instead a cyclical understanding of origin, movement, and revelation. Abstract maps, they trace an unfolding relationship between the known and obscured. Darkness and light emerge not as opposing forces, but as interdependent conditions which continually refigure perception and understanding. Black, the central color and philosophical foundation of barnes' practice, becomes a space of depth, presence, and possibility—a means of considering how material holds identity, memory, and lived experience. Informed by bell hooks' writings on objectification and subjectivity, barnes' work engages questions of agency, visibility, and the reclamation of self. Ultimately, Weight of Light proposes ascension not as transcendence or arrival, but as an ongoing practice of self-possession. Through material experimentation and an embrace of uncertainty, barnes creates space for the possibility that becoming is neither linear nor complete, but continually negotiated through acts of making, unmaking, and reclamation.

taylor barnes is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, fibers, and drawing. Her practice investigates spirituality, oral history, and structures of power through material and form. Working primarily with clay, fabric, string, and charcoal, she translates emotion and lived experience into material forms that hold traces of labor, memory, and ritual. barnes received her MFA in Fibers from the University of North Texas. She lives and works between Georgia and Austin, Texas.