| Solo exhibition at
Marcia Wood Gallery, Firmament, January 26 - March 10,
2012. installation images
In Katherine Taylor's new body of landscape paintings, time, memory
and motion are collapsed into a single perspective of the sublime.
Taylor distills the notion of landscape and horizon, arriving at
an atmospheric, elemental place that is vivid and hushed with meditative
weightlessness and expansive with light. As the title of the
series, “Firmament”, suggests, the artist is referring
to a nostalgic contemplation of the heavens as a consciousness
of ones human relationship with the natural world.
Known for powerful painting that is a tour-de-force in subtlety
Taylor refers to the living landscape as the touchstone and metaphor
for human experience. She consistently explores the impact a change
on our environment - whether sudden as a hurricane, or creeping
yet irrevocable, as in the development of a casino economy along
a previously pristine shoreline - has upon the inhabitants. With “Firmament” Taylor
turns to her interest in essential elements in the landscape that
are arranged, aligned, ordered or otherwise engineered so that
we separate “water from water”. Specifically the landscapes
depict construction sites for homes in high-risk hurricane zones,
bridges across large expanses of wetlands, or swimming pools.
The “Firmament” paintings are Taylor’s most
abstract to date. Contrasting smooth light filled areas against
tactile dimensional layers of paint, the artist uses the medium
to evoke simultaneous qualities of physical experience, such as
fast and slow, hard and soft. Taylor comments on the qualities
of light that obscure the distinction between the natural and the
man-made landscape. For Taylor, light conjures a spectrum of feelings
and emotions. Using a complex process of multiple layers of oil
and numerous reactive mediums, she creates a luminosity suggestive
of a range of interpretations from that of a celestial presence
to seduction to simple dreamy sensations.
Taylor grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi. She received her BFA at
Atlanta College of Art, and her MFA at Georgia State University.
She lives and works in Atlanta. Exhibitions include The Marietta/Cobb
Museum of Art, the Quebec City Biennale, The Atlanta Contemporary
Art Center, Diverseworks, Houston, The Dalton Gallery, Agnes Scott
College, GA, The Tubman Museum, Georgia, Brenau University, The
Albany Museum of Art, Georgia, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Florida
State University Museum of Fine Art and art fairs in Chicago, New
York, Miami, Portland and London.
Solo exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, February
19 - March 28, 2009. installation
images
|
