Euan Taylor

As the winner of the Skinny Award at the RSA New Contemporaries in 2009, The Skinny has provided Euan Taylor with a ‘mini-retrospective’ at the ROXY Art house, ann addition to smaller publicity given to the artist earlier in the year and  intended to offer a gentle kind of springboard to the beginning of an artistic career.

Taylor’s work is here represented by a huge orange crane (last seen in the central room of the RSA), a small-scale construction model and a large diamond-shaped object, with all three obviously redolent of construction sites. Taylor describes himself as ‘Chief Director of Inefficient Solutions’, the object of which is ‘creating and solving problems’, ‘building building sites’ and ‘futile endeavour’. Looking again at the work, the point is made: the huge and awkward crane is clearly inoperative; the construction model, though giving the illusion of purpose, has none, and the same is true of the strange yellow diamond/cube. On the wall behind the crane hangs a fluorescent ‘Inefficient solutions’ jacket, included as an additional humorous detail.

Taylor’s pieces succinctly make the point about the essential futility of the endless building schemes with which we are all familiar, and which are seemingly undertaken for no reason other than their own sake. Though a Dundee graduate, Taylor’s work may find a particular relevance in Edinburgh: the continued chaos of the tramworks certainly has in it an echo of Taylor’s ‘Inefficient solutions’.