24 Jul Telluride Gallery: Maggie Taylor, New Work + Talk
Join The Telluride Gallery of Fine Art in welcoming back photographer Maggie Taylor. The artist’s newest images are on display from Monday, July 24 – Sunday, July 30. The gallery plans to host Maggie for an artist talk on Thursday, July 27, 6 p.m.
In the rarefied universe of fine art photography Maggie Taylor is a super nova.
Over the years, she has produced a body of work that infuses the ordinary and mundane with a sense of magic and mystery.
They’re at it again!
Maggie Taylor grew up in the 1960s/1970s, when social commentary was the name of game in the work of Pop artists such as Andy Warhol. Her images, however, are less social commentary and more personal statements, often, though not always with a feminist cast. By means of exacting realistic techniques, Taylor manages to make her improbable, dreamlike and fantastic vision plausible and compelling – and in the process, throw viewers more than little off balance.
Unbirthday present.
In her studio, Taylor has drawers and shelves filled with all kinds of objects and pieces of text, plus Daguerreotype or Tin Type portraits of unknown subjects from the 19th century. The artist choreographs the detritus of her life indoors before taking the items outside into her yard to photograph them with an old-view camera in natural light. An avid gardener, Taylor also finds inspiration as well as actual material to scan when outside. She then builds stories around those images by combining her own photographs and scanned objects to create digital collages in Photoshop, in the end creating the final product from as many as 200 layers.
I was part of his dream.
He was part of my dream.
A book entitled “No Ordinary Days” surveys Maggie Taylor’s work from 1998 – 2012.
“In her digital photomontages Maggie Taylor opens for us multitude of doors into a seductive, richly nuanced dream world. However unlike many who explore the cross-breeding of imagery that digital systems enable, Taylor creates a microcosm with deep ties to the past. Not just the immediate past that becomes an inevitable aspect of each photographic exposure we make, but the distant past of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” wrote A.D. Coleman in an essay about the book.
“Often when people think about using the computer to make art, they mistakenly think that it is an easy solution or a very quick process. In my experience, using the computer is slower than working with a camera and film. I go back again and again to the images and refine and improve them. I only make about 10 to 15 images a year and I can be working on one image for a few weeks or even a month. That said, for me, both computer and camera are great ways to document as well as transform reality,” explained the artist.
Is this a chair?
In other words, Maggie Taylor is technically brilliant and unapologetically enigmatic, her humorous images reminiscent of Magritte or Dali, though they explore deeper archetypes.
Taylor holds a B.A. in philosophy degree from Yale University and an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Florida and she is widely collected.
Before breakfast.
Her work hangs in major museums around the country including The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson; The George Eastman House, Rochester; The High Museum, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; The Art Museum, Princeton University; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara.
Taylor’s photograph also travels internationally and have been shown in France, Germany, China and Mexico.
Note: The work of abstract artist Krista Harris is also on display at the TGFA. Harris gives a gallery talk, “Speaking Abstractly,” on Tuesday, July 25, 6 – 7 p.m.
The Boathouse, Krista Harris.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.