PACE TAYLOR // Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe

On view June 21–August 10, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, June 21 (2–5pm)

Nationale is pleased to present Pace Taylor’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe. Featuring nine new soft pastel drawings and a suite of monoprints made at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in collaboration with Master Printer Judith Baumann, the show continues Taylor’s personal and collective interrogations of belonging, desire, and place. These interrogations transpire within a terrain that registers as both quotidian and surreal, caught in the smoke-riddled lungs of the nation, and simultaneously in-flight, beyond its subduing reach.

In part, this series was conceived during drives between Portland and Pendleton—visits layered with new love, new landscapes, and the linguistic topography of the winding road through the Columbia River Gorge and Eastern Oregon. Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe unfolds like a queer and perhaps futuristic road film. Drawing from cinematic references such as Paris, Texas, Thelma and Louise, and Smoke Signals, the exhibition is structured as a sequence of encounters: fantastical, corporeal, and intrinsically dialectical. Here, the road becomes both conduit and container: a place where relationality, struggle, and hope all collide into each other as accomplices under the radioactive glow of a thrashing and waning global empire.

Taylor’s palette of uncannily vivid pastels and skewed perspectives gestures toward the genre of magical realism—a genre shaped in mid-20th-century South America amid the flat-lining political regimes of many nation-states. Taking up that torch, Taylor hijacks the visual indications of its form: unreliable lighting, distorted space, and elongated, mutating figuration. Through this, they beckon us into a world where our stagnant expectations are disrupted if not dissolved.

Works like Bar Games, Stetson, American Spirit, and the titular work, Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe call on the performance of everyday life under an exhuming capitalism, examining the semiotics of consumption and refusal: a pack of light blue American Spirits, a bottle of Rainier, a Stetson-branded trucker cap. These scenes don’t prescribe a moral antidote. Instead, they hold space for a capacious and dynamic contradiction, drawing on the multiplicity of queer performance, which evades and reroutes a capturing empirical and imperial witness.

In this series, Taylor is also constellating themselves within a lineage of artists who rigorously contemplate these visual dialects. George Morrison’s horizon line, Marisol’s magical realism, and Fritz Scholder’s hijacking of commercial iconography, all inform this study into place and performance.

Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe asks what it means to move through this world while under its weight. More than that, it considers what it means to perform a collective struggle—an enactment of a utopia never attained yet always referenced, storied, and imagined—as we navigate the death and dearth of a hollowed nation, as agents complicit, subjected, and unsettling all at once. While it offers no resolution, this series instead maps out a landscape of ambivalence, tenderness, and quiet refusal—one where truth is elastic, reality is performed, and care lives in the in-between, or perhaps, on the road.

Pace Taylor lives and works in Portland, OR. They received their BFA in Digital Arts from the University of Oregon (2015) and have since shown their work nationally and internationally, including at Nationale, Upfor, ILY2 in Portland, OR; La Loma Projects in Los Angeles; Double V Gallery in Paris; and Galeria Pelaires in Mallorca, Spain. They were previously selected to participate in the Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Residency at Caldera, Tropical Contemporary’s Transformation Residency, and Centrum’s Emerging Artist Residency. Taylor received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2022, an Arts3C Grant from Regional Arts & Culture Council in 2023, and was awarded the Don Bachardy Fellowship by The Christopher Isherwood Foundation to study at the Royal Drawing School of London, also in 2023. Their work is on permanent display at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Health Sciences Building and included in the collection of the Portland Art Museum. Pace Taylor is represented by Nationale.

Please note that we are contacting folks on the waitlist one at a time with the Collectors’ Preview and will do so while the work remains available. We are a small team and cannot always answer each message individually. Our focus this week will be on installing and presenting the exhibition and we appreciate your understanding at this time. We can’t wait to share this new body of work with you and are truly appreciative of everyone’s enthusiasm!