Artist Pace Taylor’s studio is surrounded by artifacts of Portland’s early history. It’s on the second floor of an early 20th-century brick warehouse, sandwiched between the railroad tracks and the Willamette, in a sleepy industrial neighborhood of North Portland. Chalky sticks of pastel are loosely arranged according to color on a central table, and multihued dust lightly coats every surface, illuminated by the golden afternoon sun.

For the past few months, this space has been an incubator for Taylor’s current solo exhibition at Portland gallery Nationale, Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe. The name of the show evokes relics of the American empire, now haunted by the decline of manufacturing, looming tariffs, and cartoonish nationalism. But instead of feeling entombed by history, Taylor’s new work seems to burst forth from the rubble with a new energy. Last Call reassembles fragments of the past into a vision of utopia-in-flux, vibrating with high-key color and conceptual weight.

In recent years, Taylor’s figurative work in soft pastel and graphite has been featured in exhibitions at galleries in Portland, Los Angeles, and Paris, gaining a devoted following for their saturated hues and emotional charge. Elegant, sculptural bodies, sidelong glances, and domestic interiors mingle in shades of orange and magenta. Subjects are defined with sinuous contour lines in fine pencil, which also sets off select details: pensive eyes, pursed lips. In past shows, suggestions of specific settings like nightclubs or bedrooms brought into focus a recurring theme that Taylor explains as “the collision between intimacy and isolation, and how you can have both of those things in the same moment.”

Taylor’s recognizable style (and their signature medium) grew out of portrait commissions, a way they made extra cash in their early career. “I wanted a cheap way to add color,” they said. A set of entry-level soft pastels serendipitously appeared around the same time they scored a larger studio space (and thus the freedom to make a bit more of a mess), and Taylor has stuck with them ever since.

The definitive qualities of pastel—pure, saturated, opaque pigment contrasting with fragility and ambiguity, as the chalky medium blurs and shifts on the paper—were a natural fit for Taylor’s intuitive working style. “It’s not a super conscious decision-making process,” they explained. “I try to just let things be… there’s something beautiful in the happenstance, the mistakes, however you want to see it.” Their occasional forays into watercolor show echoes of this approach in the fluidity and unpredictability of layers of transparent paint.

Last Call's compositions could be viewed as a return to Taylor’s beginnings in illustration, which they studied as an undergrad at the University of Oregon. “This show in particular probably has the strongest narrative [of all my solo exhibitions],” they said, “even though it’s not linear.” In place of their usual party scenes and domestic tableaux, Taylor has built a kaleidoscopic landscape that incorporates shreds of Americana, recontextualized within a decidedly queer aesthetic.

Part of this new direction came about during a residency Taylor completed at the renowned Crow’s Shadow Printmaking Studio on the Umatilla Reservation near Pendleton, Oregon. “Pendleton is a really interesting place,” they noted. “There’s a story between the Native community and the people in the town who see themselves as part of the legacy of the American West.”

At the famous Pendleton Roundup, “it was interesting to see people’s commitment to the iconography of the American West… [I noticed] signifiers around what people wear, what people consume.” The inclusion of logos—like Stetson, American Spirit, PBR—in Taylor’s new paintings speaks to the power of these cultural markers in crafting personal identity and a collective origin story. Cowboy-hatted figures drink whiskey around a saloon table, a couple embraces in their car at a Love’s truck stop, and a realistic rabbit meets its fate under the tires of a cartoon sedan, complete with Looney Tunes-style dust cloud.

Taylor’s interest in genre marks an expansion on previous shows’ focus on queer identity and relationships as a primary subject—zooming out to ask what it means to look back at the world through a queer lens. They chalked up this evolution to the self-assurance gained through experience. “Now that I’m more confident in my work it’s easier to let my sensibilities guide my work rather than my identity,” they said. “[Identity] is the analytic for this story,” rather than the subject.

When their partner, a curator and scholar of art theory, introduced them to José Estaben Muñoz’s 2009 book Cruising Utopia, Taylor quickly linked it to their newfound interest in the culture of the American West: “[Estaben is] talking about how to get to a queer utopian future… it’s something that doesn’t exist now but we always have to be working towards.” Taylor sees the myth of the American West as being linked to “this idea of utopia… what do we want to build?”

“There’s been this rise of interest in the Western [genre] over the past couple of years,” they said. “People can tell—whether or not they want to admit it—that (we are currently in) a time of waning empire,” and the mythology of the cowboy and his open range seem ripe for reinterpretation within this context.

The Western genre, with its complicated heroes, charismatic bad actors, and wild frontiers, appeals as a way to look forward when the world is profoundly destabilized and trust in our social structures has been eroded. “Who is called an outlaw right now?” Taylor mused. “Since the conception of the US, [our leaders] have been outlaws, creating corrupt laws and not even abiding by their own word.” In times like these, art can be a way to imagine a better future, or at least a path in that direction. “It’s this collective imagination around these things that we have to have.”

The world of Taylor’s new show was also informed by their love of genre films and books, including sci fi, horror, magical realism, and the classic Western. “I watch a lot of movies; so when I’m putting the work together, I’m thinking about that visual storytelling, and the feeling you can get from putting together all these different images.”

The road movie genre, which for Taylor includes classics like Thelma & Louise and Paris, Texas, was a particular inspiration. “In all of these movies, you are leaving behind something and moving towards something else,” they explained, “you can be a different person with [new] people,” when you exit your comfort zone.

Now, Taylor will have the chance to live out their own road movie moment as they prepare to pack up and move cross-country to New York, with their partner, later this year. Relieved to have already found a gay soccer club to replace their Portland crew, they noted equal excitement to encounter new scenes as they leave the “Portland bubble.” Here’s hoping that hitting the road will lead Taylor to find their own utopia, or in their words, to “get to a place that feels true.”

Last Call at the Rainbow Cafe is on view at Nationale, 15 SE 22nd, through Sun Aug 10,  nationale.us