In her simulated realities, Chapin’s faceless figures emerge from prismatic interlocking waves in contradicting or mirrored formats. A central body often appears self-assured, pensive, and at times seductive, while transparent doubles float adjacent in space in physical and emotional states of languish. Languishing, a term representing a feeling of emptiness and stagnation, was notably made popular when the New York Times coined it “the dominant emotion of 2021” following tides of pandemic-induced societal shifts. Chapin leans into the tensions of this zeitgeist, like the dominance of the “digital self” and how her chronically online generation constructs themselves for their perceived audience and performs within an overtly commercialized system.

Her transparent figures may be simultaneously read as the shadow self, a concept appropriated from Jungian psychology to online self-help jargon that encourages a radical integration of our less desirable characteristics, failures and wrongdoing with our external self. Chapin approaches these melodramas from a dualistic perspective, with empathy for human complexity while signaling a pre-determined system we find ourselves in. Throughout each artwork, repetitive visual patterns imprint on these forms, creating a tangle between where we come from and what we are exposed to. In both process and concept, this element of reflexivity, as it relates to the construction of value, has become a throughline in Chapin’s art practice.

Taylor Chapin was born and raised in Encinitas, California. She received a BFA in Painting from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, and graduated with a MFA in Visual Art from University of California, San Diego in 2022. She has shown her work at institutions throughout southern California including ICA San Diego, the Oceanside Museum of Art, and the San Diego Library. She has also recently created public-facing murals in Leucadia and Oceanside as well as the UCSD campus. Chapin lives and works in Oceanside, California.