Valiant by Austyn Taylor is a heroic ceramic horse sculpture. A bright, brave example of Austyn's work using imagery which is foundational for so many millions of minds – the cartoon, the toy, the animal – symbols of growth and healing.
Austyn says, "My art practice is at its core a reaction to the deconstructed heaps of culture left by post modernism and a search for value and virtue. My aim as an artist is to create works which circle around sacred values such as unconditional love, authenticity, imagination and human dignity. For 20 years my work has utilized figurative characters evolved from the closest thing to authentically sacred symbols from my culture- the graphic hand drawn aesthetics found in American animation."
Description
We are pulling some amazing pieces from Austyn's archive! Valiant horse sculpture is from 2016. From the artist: My work is formed within the populist style of American animation, I give the figures a meta-modernist examination and then pose them to stare self-consciously at the absurdity of our collective humanity. The resulting sculpted and drawn works use “concerned humor” to address subconscious pseudo-spiritual scripts underlying popularly embodied mythologies (psychologies) of self. Note the shrunken small head in contrast to the big horse body, emblematic of the humor of cartoons but also a social statement on celebrating our differences.