Never try to ride a bicycle which has passed through Taylor Hokanson's studio or rather garage! You may risk serious injuries while swinging your leg over the saddle, mounting the special bike parked in Gallery UNO, Fine Arts Building, during Taylor Hokanson's exhibition. The seat made of paper would sag under your weight. What about a sip from the bottle fixed on the bicycle frame? You will stay thirsty, it is a paper bottle.

Taylor Hokanson restores objects of daily use questioning the usefulness and the functional premises of repairing. What happens, when you whet a spoon instead of the knife, which is meant to getting sharpened in order to fulfill its task? To confound methods of repairing or taking those out of context can be dangerous, at least irritating. Choosing the suitable material for prosthesis is fundamental. Usually the substitute consists of the same material; nature of the compensable good is imitated in order to keep the functionality.

With his modifications, Taylor Hokanson undermines the implicitness of repairing. The patches on the bike are obviously deceptive: He replaces damages with implants of spotless white paper.

Whereas assemblage artists as Dubuffet, Rauschenberg or Louise Nevelson point out abrasion of 'objets trouvés' and pick the fragmentation of damaged things out as a central theme, according to the principle: depreciation, appropriation, estimation, Taylor Hokanson tries to complete defects his own way. Instead of taking broken bikes into his studio and displaying them in an exhibition, he leaves them in the streets and carries out 'public repairs' on-site. This 'accident surgery' is documented; the video clips will be displayed in the exhibition. Since paper is a non-durable material, the patches will probably last until the next rain shower. By choosing paper, Taylor Hokanson refers to the preliminary drawing table, where the conceptual design for every object is developed. Blueprints are transformed to models, archetypes for further mass production. Collage is redefined: No longer used newspaper dada artists liked and combined to tableaux, commenting a mindset of deterioration, but spotless sheets of paper accurately glued together to evident fake structures. Taylor Hokanson invites the audience to do the same, keeping ready cut-out sheets for everybody.

TAYLOR HOKANSON is American artist based in Chicago.

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