In fact, we have all been in love with Alice in Wonderland.
This is a favourite of ours!
This portfolio by Maggie Taylor sent by A Gallery for Fine Photography in New Orleans.
It is accompanied by a text by Mark Sloan.
JJN
“The time has come”, the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes – and ships – and sealing wax – Of cabbages – and kings- And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” – Lewis Carroll—from The Walrus and the Carpenter
This quote from Lewis Carroll is illustrative of Maggie Taylor’s creative process on several levels. First, her imagery is the result of a lifetime of accumulated memories, objects, and images—many we all share. The difference between her memory banks and ours is that she is able to store, catalogue, and retrieve this material digitally and then combine these elements into startlingly familiar images that might best be described as still frames from waking dreams. Her images vacillate between the surreal world of pure imagination and the sensorium of the real.
The emblematic afterimages produced by Maggie Taylor’s digital creations are inviting, transporting, and unforgettable. If one is willing to surrender to the sense of adventure, these images can take the viewer on a veritable magic carpet ride. Taylor’s images are built, layer by layer, and object by object, through a disciplined studio process of trial and error. It is only through looking at dozens of these images, and spending time with them, that one begins to unravel the artist’s sensibilities, peculiar fascinations, and what I call her visual vocabularium. What I mean by that term is that Taylor has a particular obsession with certain images and tropes. It is as if she has a deep image-well (the vocabularium) to which she returns, time and again, to pluck out new specimens to audition for a given composition. For example, there may be a human figure in the foreground of an image wearing a sweater and goggles. Well, if you look to the right, there might be dog wearing goggles and a transparent tutu (of course!). These two characters somehow rhyme, and belong together in this alternative universe. The title of this book Internal Logic intentionally highlights this artist’s sense of what makes an image “work”, and offers insights into the shape and contours of this image-well from which the artist draws her inspiration. She uses this archive of images as a lexicon through which to communicate her multi-layered imaginings. Each image contains the keys to understanding the corpus of other images.
I have had the pleasure of watching Taylor’s work evolve over a twenty-five-year period, and curated a show of her work when I was the director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2002. Since that time, her work has matured and become much more richly imbued with associational possibilities. Through Taylor’s work, then, as now, one is able to glimpse the restless experimentation and sense of play that animates her worldview. We, as spectators, are along for the ride, and are encouraged to deduce our own personal discoveries along the way.
The manipulation of both scale and context in the picture plane makes room for new interpretations and insights to emerge. Her focus on natural history; taxonomies; antique photographs; recurrent motifs of clouds, gramophones, goggles, and fashion (among many other slight perseverations), Taylor leads us on a tour of her own imagination, complete with personal fixations and aesthetic impulses. This cornucopia of personal revelations contains nothing short of what Carl Jung referred to as our collective unconscious. The fact that many of the items in Taylor’s visual vocabularium represent dead or dying technologies (gramophones, old photos, Zeppelins, etc.) is further evidence that these poetic renderings are intended as cultural markers for things nearing extinction from our collective memory. These objects and images from our past are skillfully woven into memorable fictions, often presented on a surface that appears to be the antique canvas from a dimly remembered painting, deftly blending the past, present, and future. In this sense, these manufactured worlds are both timeless and timely—offering musings and sagacious observations about our human species, our curious predicaments, and peccadillos.
If we read these images with a particular lens, we might conclude that the artist is creating a meta-narrative commentary on the fallacy that humans hold dominion over the flora and fauna of the planet. Her perspicacious imagery might be viewed as meditations on the very essence of human nature itself. Much like Zen koans which are intended as unresolvable thought experiments (the most frequently cited one being—”what is the sound of one hand clapping?”), Taylor’s work certainly presents conundrums and paradoxical riddles. And, in fact, she prizes the act of questioning as a virtue unto itself, for it is while engaged in questioning that the mind is most alive. There are recurrent animal species—zebras, rhinos, birds of all stripes, butterflies, and fish aplenty, but these creatures, as well as flowers and other flora, are presented in the context of the great human tapestry. For example, they often perform as foils to the pathetic human need for clothing in the form of fashion and Taylor often adorns creatures with human clothing or accessories, accentuating their silliness. This brings to mind the Oscar Wilde quote “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months”.
There is a palpable sense of astonishment that permeates these works. In a society now moving at break-neck pace, hurtling toward tomorrow’s technological miracles, Taylor’s art invites us to slow down; to dare to be awed, if only for a few moments. In the space she creates, we are free to allow our minds to wander, to wonder, and to speculate wildly. It has to be said as well that there is an overarching sense of quirkiness to these works. By quirky, I mean idiosyncratic. Taylor’s proclivities and foibles are everywhere evident, yet her personal obsessions are part of the charm that makes these images so irresistible. There is also a healthy dash of humor and/or whimsy lurking in many images, revealing yet another facet of the artist’s personality. My guess is that psychologists would have a field day with Taylor’s art, unpacking the myriad signs and symbols contained within.
Many of the spaces created in the picture planes of these images appear to be realistic, or at least plausible. This sense of perspectival veracity is important to Taylor, as she seeks to create the sheen of believability by carefully placing shadows in the proper location, for example, and to provide orientation; making sure we are “grounded” in at least a semblance of reality. Once we are grounded, and attuned to the operative “internal logic”, we are then free to absorb and respond to the rich fictional content contained within the image. Herein lies the power of Taylor’s artistry; she is capable of conjuring an entire short story or poem within a single image. We are left to marvel, decipher, project upon, and digest the fragments of narrative she drops like breadcrumbs. Each of us has our own reading, and that is indeed the artist’s intent.
Maggie Taylor’s art exploits our desire to apprehend the world through logic, as we are conditioned to do. By creating a body of imagery that contains its own internal logic, the artist (who has a background in philosophy) confuses our efforts to make sense out of our shared world of “shoes, and ships, and sealing wax”. Her logic allows for a world that contains a rhinoceros sporting a pearl necklace, clouds that become music, and where a scallop shell becomes a ball gown—a world where poets retreat and writers revel. This self-contained universe offers wry commentary on the march of technological progress while urging us to rethink what we might have to learn from the animal kingdom. There are many images showing animals helping one another or morphing into human form. By demonstrating the interconnectedness of all creation, Taylor is, in short, offering a balm to us world-weary citizens in our collective quest to make sense of it all—we should grasp that respite while we still can.
Mark Sloan
Mark Sloan is an independent curator, writer, and artist currently living in the wilds of North Carolina. He owns several pair of goggles and a gramophone.
The photographs are available through A Gallery for Fine Photography, New Orleans.
A Gallery for Fine Photography
241 Chartres St, New Orleans, LA 70130
www.agallery.com
www.maggietaylor.com
