“This is a dot. A dot is a sound. A dot is a sound in space. This is a dot in space…” This is the voiceover, augmented with psychedelic tonal music, which emanates from a speaker casually draped with hand-painted fabrics reminiscent of an American flag. The sonically infused gallery space is populated with paintings, drawings, photos, and sculptures by Canadian artist Zin Taylor—with each and every one of them featuring black-and-white stripes and dots. Based in Brussels for nearly a decade, Taylor has been gaining an increasing international reputation with exhibitions across Europe and North America. “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 7)” is now his fourth exhibition at Toronto’s Jessica Bradley Gallery, and is the latest in a series of shows in which he sets out to explore the cornerstones of both abstraction and figuration. Taylor’s visual vocabulary is intentionally limited to black-and-white stripes and dots; however, it is the syntactical play of these elements in disparate contexts that energize his work. In contrast to the work of the modernist masters that comes to mind when one thinks of philosophies and hypotheses of abstraction—like Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, or Josef Albers, who each believed that their experiments in …