Taylor Zanke (b. 1992, Toronto) is a Canadian artist working with sculpture and installation. He maintains a production and publishing project embedded within his artistic praxis, titled Allowing Many Forms, which began in 2022.

Education

M.Arch

M.S. Real Estate Development

B.F.A. Design & Technology

Exhibitions

Untitled

Troubled Kinships

A Matter Of Space

Leaf Thru Pore Over

I Know Some Things Form Without You

Awards

William Kinne Travelling Fellowship

Publications

The Source Can Be Transformed

Projects

Allowing Many Forms

My art making practice focuses on shaping the conditions within which works arise, rather than on the execution of particular projects or pieces. I do this by engaging with a shifting collection of ephemeral material - including paper, packaging, architectural debris, or furniture - that I have gathered from the built environment, domestic space, and my personal history. I develop an awareness of the qualities of this collection by influencing and being influenced by the shifting conditions of its storage, transportation, installation, and availability. This process connects personal memory and association to the immediacy of material through an evolving vocabulary of fragments which I further through artist books, sculptures, and installations.

I bring this process into contact with new spatial or psychological situations from which additional material is drawn, and which transforms the internal dynamics between its elements. I document this ongoing cycle through photographs and drawings, as well as through the collection itself becoming a kind of formwork, where imprints of sites past are embodied in made attachments between elements with glue, string, or screws. These documentations become material that is reincorporated into my process which then report something about what has unfolded.

I think about the ways in which this process speaks to the shifting status of elements as art, and how conventional notions of function, value, or origin can be both set and unset. Through my practice I explore the ways in which perceptions of things as singular or in multiple can shift and be evolved. I relate this line of questioning to my materials, their (re)appearance in an evolving lineage of sites and locations, and the extent to which their internal relations are fixed or detached.