FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Through October 28, 2004

Opening Reception:
Thursday September 14, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.

KATHERINE TAYLOR

September 14 - October 28, 2004

Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Atlanta-based artist Katherine Taylor. The exhibition follows closely on the heels of Taylor’s acclaimed solo exhibition at The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center earlier this year. The Marcia Wood Gallery exhibition debuts only one week after a version of Taylor’s exhibition at the Contemporary opens at DiverseWorks in Houston, TX.

Originally from Biloxi, MS, Katherine Taylor has emerged as one of Atlanta’s most insightful and provocative artists. Taylor demonstrates tour-de-force painting skills in an impressively broad range of techniques, disciplines and imagery, from portraiture to epic landscapes. A key concern with the dialogue between painting and photography as it informs the context and interpretation of narrative imagery is ever-present in Taylor’s oeuvre. Tantalizingly multiform and almost chameleon-like in her stylistic and thematic breadth, the artist’s works have in common among other things a locational genesis. Taylor again and again finds herself drawn to her Biloxi hometown (as it exists now as well as how it exists in her memories) as subject and muse for her paintings. With poetic and wryly-philosophical inquiry she expands that core of personal experience into works that are deeply, universally resonant.

In her first exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, 2002’s “Boomtown,” Taylor realized with rich, wet and gleaming oil on panel a series of deceptively beautiful and serene night views of the Mississippi river coastline. Working from stills of videos made by Taylor from a moving car at night, the paintings Taylor created for that show depicted distanced views of the garish and glamorous blurred electric lights along the water’s edge, where the rapid influx of riverboat casinos had revitalized the struggling local economy, but in the process had definitively altered the pristine natural landscape. Taylor returned to the water’s edge in her next series of paintings, entitled “Aftermath”, exploring the artist’s profoundly embedded personal experience, at only 4 years old, of the fury of Hurricane Camille – a defining moment in both personal and civic history. Beginning, as ever, with photographic documentation, Taylor accessed an array of newspaper and archived photojournalism of hurricanes, floods and tropical storms to re-create images of the aftermath of natural disasters. She chose the icon of the automobile, made vulnerable and displaced in the strange new landscape, as a potent, poignant symbol of our own fragility and temporality. As opposed to the brilliantly seductive palette and promising surfaces of the “Boomtown” series, the “Aftermath” canvases were rendered in hushed monotone sepias and grays with a soft matte surface suggestive of the primordial stillness after an epic event.

The paintings to be premiered at Taylor’s upcoming exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, will be an evolution, both subjectively and stylistically, of the “Boomtown” and “Aftermath” bodies of work. Returning yet again to the coastal vistas of the Mississippi, Taylor finds the landscape once more radically changed – this time by the sudden impact of Hurricane Katrina. Many of the same areas depicted in the Boomtown series of 2002 are now unrecognizable. Where once the blazing lights of the riverboat casinos shone among the lights of houses and development those riverboats engendered, the houses are now vanished and the riverboat lights glow in jarring pockets of darkened isolation. The unstable landscape fluctuates between odd arrangements of surviving structures standing among heaps of wreckage from ruined buildings, alongside wide swathes of empty land where rubble has cleared away and which seemingly have been given back over to marshland, if only temporarily. Taylor washes these landscapes in the tentative palette of twilight, a gesture equally indicative of the hope of sunrise or the resignation of nightfall, and an appropriate choice to depict humanity’s state of flux and the uncertainties the future holds.