Marquetry master Alison Elizabeth Taylor takes on the potent subject of foreclosure in her third solo show at James Cohan Gallery. Taylor has made a name for herself by bringing the Renaissance craft of marquetry or wood-inlay into the 21st century. A medium originally associated with wealth and luxury, Taylor creates an inherent tension by often choosing bleak or banal subjects for her socially conscious paintings.
Take time to marvel at Taylor’s ability to use the grain and tone of the wood veneer to create highly realistic depictions. In an interview with Kurt Andersen on WYNC’s Studio 360, Taylor mentioned there are easily 40 different types of wood veneer in a small work.
For example in Hole Kicked Taylor explained that the background is holly, the darkness inside is fumed oak, and the tears are tropical olive. She had originally been working with wood-grain contact paper but a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art after she arrived in New York in 2003 and her discovery of the Studiolo from the Dual Palace in Gubbio, a masterpiece of Renaissance marquetry and it’s extraordinary trompe l’oeil or “trick of the eye” detail changed her life!
Taylor’s current show was inspired by a visit to her childhood home of Las Vegas and seeing a lovingly restored Victorian home that was in foreclosure. In retribution, the owners had deliberately left on the 2nd floor tap to flood the house they had painstakingly scraped, sanded, and painted. Taylor was struck by the extent of damage and it’s demonstration of the devastating emotional impact of foreclosure. She understands the violence towards the house as a stand-in for the bankers, mortgage bundlers, and brokers. Taylor installs Tap Left On in the corner of the ceiling and as Karen Rosenberg reported in the New York Times, “…mappa and pepperwood furl are excellent stand-ins for buckling plaster and peeling paint.”
In this body of work, notice how Taylor takes us inside the houses to survey the physical wreckage in connection with foreclosure. To do her research, Taylor climbed in broken windows of foreclosed homes in Las Vegas and other communities hard hit by the sub-prime mortgage crisis including Florida and New Orleans. As she explains in the gallery press release, “I create works based on the damage I’ve seen: punched and kicked out holes in drywall, shotgun blasts from inside a house thru the exterior wall, broken doors, windows, stolen pipes and copper wire, taps left on to flood, angry graffiti, stripped interiors, and in one case a hole in the back of the house that squatters had made with a pickaxe, a sort of back door where they could come and go unseen by neighbors.”
Taylor’s painstaking labor-intensive process, the beauty of her wood veneers, and outstanding trompe l’oeil effect stand in marked contrast to her subject: the devastation and loss of people’s homes.
Alison Elizabeth
TaylorForeclosed
James Cohan Gallery - 533 West 26th Street
until June 19, 2010