Andrea Taylor
CV
Andrea is an artist whose work considers body fragility/strength, temporality, corporeality, movement, and the experience the viewer has with the work. Using mostly commonplace materials, she creates abstract mixed-media sculptures, drawings and stop-motion videos. Andrea holds an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2014). She completed a Banff Centre Spring Intensive Residency in 2017. Past solo shows include Malaspina Printmakers and Back Gallery Project (Monica Reyes Gallery). One of her videos was included in God in Reverse: When Wisdom Defies Capture, digital exhibition curated by Mohammad Salemy for Richmond Art Gallery in 2020. In 2022, she has a solo show at Mónica Reyes Gallery, as well as a three-person exhibition at Gordon Smith Gallery with M.E. Sparks and Russna Kaur, curated by Kate Henderson. She has taught for many years for Continuing Studies at Emily Carr University.
"My sculptures are created using mostly commonplace materials to make anthropomorphic mixed-media forms. My work considers body fragilities/strengths, temporality, and movement. Relating to my sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems, I intend my work to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or experience between sculpture and viewer.Using mostly mass-produced materials and improvised processes, I make sculptures that are at the same time materially engaging and strong, anthropomorphic and abstracted. Hand-made marks being overtly visible to the viewer is also important in my work along with movement, colour, and abstraction. Artists whose work greatly interests and influences me include Phyllida Barlow, Eva Hesse, Amy Sillman, Louise Bourgeois, Erin Shirreff, Lee Bontecou, Maria Lassnig, Ramekon O'Arwisters, and Franz West, all of whose work explores embodied experience in a variety of ways." (Andrea Taylor, July 2022)
Andrea is an artist whose work considers body fragility/strength, temporality, corporeality, movement, and the experience the viewer has with the work. Using mostly commonplace materials, she creates abstract mixed-media sculptures, drawings and stop-motion videos. Andrea holds an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2014). She completed a Banff Centre Spring Intensive Residency in 2017. Past solo shows include Malaspina Printmakers and Back Gallery Project (Monica Reyes Gallery). One of her videos was included in God in Reverse: When Wisdom Defies Capture, digital exhibition curated by Mohammad Salemy for Richmond Art Gallery in 2020. In 2022, she has a solo show at Mónica Reyes Gallery, as well as a three-person exhibition at Gordon Smith Gallery with M.E. Sparks and Russna Kaur, curated by Kate Henderson. She has taught for many years for Continuing Studies at Emily Carr University.
"My sculptures are created using mostly commonplace materials to make anthropomorphic mixed-media forms. My work considers body fragilities/strengths, temporality, and movement. Relating to my sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems, I intend my work to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or experience between sculpture and viewer.Using mostly mass-produced materials and improvised processes, I make sculptures that are at the same time materially engaging and strong, anthropomorphic and abstracted. Hand-made marks being overtly visible to the viewer is also important in my work along with movement, colour, and abstraction. Artists whose work greatly interests and influences me include Phyllida Barlow, Eva Hesse, Amy Sillman, Louise Bourgeois, Erin Shirreff, Lee Bontecou, Maria Lassnig, Ramekon O'Arwisters, and Franz West, all of whose work explores embodied experience in a variety of ways." (Andrea Taylor, July 2022)
Past Exhibition
Points of Contact
July 16 - August 13, 2022 | MRG at Mackenzie Heights
Exhibition view "Andrea Taylor: Points of Contact" | Image credit: Rachel Topham Photography
Mónica Reyes Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of "Points of Contact", showcasing works by Andrea Taylor, recently part of the exhibition "We can only hint at this with words" at the Gordon Smith Foundation in North Vancouver curated by Kate Henderson.
The title of the exhibition "Points of Contact" is referring to the experience each viewer has with the sculptures. Andrea Taylor invites the viewer to spend time understanding the multitude of detail in her work, contemplating the point of contact between their lived time spent in front of the work and the work itself. "My broader artistic practice is an experimental intuitive multi-disciplinary practice. My sculptures are created using mostly commonplace materials to make anthropomorphic mixed-media forms. My work considers body fragilities/strengths, temporality, and movement. Relating to my sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems, I intend my work to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or experience between sculpture and viewer." (Andrea Taylor, July 2022)
The title of the exhibition "Points of Contact" is referring to the experience each viewer has with the sculptures. Andrea Taylor invites the viewer to spend time understanding the multitude of detail in her work, contemplating the point of contact between their lived time spent in front of the work and the work itself. "My broader artistic practice is an experimental intuitive multi-disciplinary practice. My sculptures are created using mostly commonplace materials to make anthropomorphic mixed-media forms. My work considers body fragilities/strengths, temporality, and movement. Relating to my sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems, I intend my work to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or experience between sculpture and viewer." (Andrea Taylor, July 2022)
More Works by Andrea Taylor:
"We can only hint at this with words"
Group show with Andrea Taylor, M.E. Sparks and Russna Kaur
curated by Kate Henderson |Gordon Smith Foundation | April 23 - June 25, 2022
Installation view "We can only hint at this with words" at Gordon Smith Foundation (image credit: Gordon Smith Foundation)
There is a slowness that happens in the body when we can’t quite name what we’re looking at. Openness and vulnerability arrive via the experience of looking without speaking, and the phrase “We can only hint at this with words” suggests that a feeling, a moment, or an experience is yearning to be named. But the exhibition’s title also points to the inadequacies of language. Our bodies hold memory, story, and trauma, and words often fail to convey the fleshy, corporeal narrative that defines a life. That is to say, words can only hint at what lies beneath the surface. Through multisurfaced experiential painting, sculpture, installation, and animation, Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, and Andrea Taylor aim to fill in the blanks where words cannot describe the myriad personal, historical, and cultural encounters and occurrences that make up the human experience.
All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with.
These extraverbal conversations reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion.
continue reading here
All three artists share an approach to surface and material, and through their work each explores the limits and possibilities of their respective mediums. In what ways can an image be extended, pulled apart, unhinged from its borders, set free? How can mediums with predetermined uses become malleable and unfixed? In what ways are these material concerns a metaphor for how we move through the world as humans—particularly as women? We can only hint at this with words attempts to answer these questions through the wordless language of materials and the traces of unseen gestures. The exhibited works resist the boundaries of wall and plinth—they creep, fold, and drape throughout the gallery, becoming unfixed, modular, and ever evolving. The surface of each artwork becomes a skin that tells a story. In this way, these mixed-media objects become living, breathing bodies in the room—entities that we, as viewers, can engage in wordless conversation with.
These extraverbal conversations reveal both the personal and sociohistorical complexities brewing beneath the skin of each work. The artists cull from childhood narratives, cultural traditions, and art historical legacies to create new meanings, thereby inserting their own presences into the folds of history. Through the artists’ processes of quoting, redacting, and revising histories—both personal and political—they subvert heteronormative, patriarchal legacies, proposing alternative narratives that pull apart and reject problematic and oppressive histories that have become bound to the female body. The exhibition opens up into other wordless worlds that speak to experiential and radical lines of questioning, bodily freedom, care, and rebellion.
continue reading here
Virtual Contributor Panel: We can only hint at this with words
With curator Kate Henderson and artists Andrea Taylor, Russna Kaur and M.E. Sparks
The artist Andrea Taylor, Russna Kaur and M.E. Sparks speak about their exhibition "We can only hint at this with words" at the Gordon Smith Foundation with curator Kate Henderson.
A selection of Andrea Taylor's work included in that exhibition are shown in "Points of Contact" at the Mackenzie Heights location of the gallery.
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ANDREA TAYLOR
shares her thoughts and hopes during self-isolation in Burnaby, BC. March 20, 2020 |
Past exhibitions at Mónica Reyes Gallery (formerly Back Gallery Project)
Voices of Unknown Origin (aka the time traveller) | 2016
Reference images from stills of the 1896 film showing Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance are pushed though various strategies and filters in Andrea’s process which includes a variety of media and an interest in visceral responses to visual art. Playful use of this 19th century imagery allows us into the artist’s mind as she imagines this abstract figure as a time traveller and an avatar for herself and for the viewer if they would like to join in.
The time traveller manifests in this exhibition as bronze sculpture, as palladium prints with interventions, as oil paintings and even as acrylic paint on photographs. In one of the bodies of work included in this exhibition, historic Canadian landscape paintings are printed as photographs and abstract figures are painted on them in powerful monumental poses. These time travellers are accessing our idealized Canadian landscapes in these photographs of paintings, but show us their own real-life painty materiality in their powerful, sculptural non-idealized female forms.
The time traveller manifests in this exhibition as bronze sculpture, as palladium prints with interventions, as oil paintings and even as acrylic paint on photographs. In one of the bodies of work included in this exhibition, historic Canadian landscape paintings are printed as photographs and abstract figures are painted on them in powerful monumental poses. These time travellers are accessing our idealized Canadian landscapes in these photographs of paintings, but show us their own real-life painty materiality in their powerful, sculptural non-idealized female forms.
Text by Kristina Fiedrich
A woman dances alone on a stage. The swathes of fabric bellowing and collapsing around her as she moves; spinning, swirling. From one moment to the next, the dancer’s body becomes engulfed by the folds of fabric, disappearing from view, while simultaneously expanding, transforming and breathing beyond her skin. Described by art critic Mallarmé as resembling giant petals, butterflies or a conch shell unfurling1, the dancer, suspended in place and time, is an apparition. Her body, disproportionate and malleable, is an abstraction of flesh and movement, taking up and traveling through space.
For most students of art history, this is a familiar film – the Lumière Brothers Danse Serpentine, c. 1896. Attributed to American modern dance pioneer and inventor Loïe Fuller, the serpentine dance was enhanced by Fuller’s patented garment, which allowed dancers to become subsumed almost entirely by the triangular shaped, light-weight material.2 The garment, guided by the dancer’s body, expands the curvilinear lines of the feminine form, while also challenging the shape and proportions of what was considered a beautiful figure. As Rancière noted, this is a new body.3
Now, ahead by a century. Vancouver-based artist Andrea Taylor takes up the image of the serpentine dancer, exploring the varied embodied forms through photography, paintings, drawings, moving-image and sculptures in Voices of Unknown Origin (AKA the Time Traveler). Deconstructing and decomposing the Lumière Brothers moving-image into over 200 stills, Taylor has returned the pulsing, swirling figure – once ethereal and gauzy – to an on-going series of mysterious bodily/fleshy masses. Each still becomes an instant for another reality, another space, another body. Opaque, weighted and voluminous, the dancing figure begins to resemble botanical, floral and invertebrate shapes. The metamorphosis of the feminine form as it becomes a new, unknown body, full of potential.
The unknown, as a catalyst for making, is present in Taylor’s work. Through process and repetition, the spiraling dancing body is re-presented through a variety of media. A series of palladium prints delves into the archaeology of media, restoring an archaic process and fixing the body in space and time. Returning the moving image to a former technology, Taylor upends the hierarchy of technological systems, and produces, reproduces and transforms the image. Is the unknown more knowable through repetition? Will this body, this figure, this organic feminine form, come into focus?
By slowing down, or reversing the movement of the dancer, the artist is asking the viewer to consider another time, another moment – whether past, present or future. Time travel, as suggested by the title of the exhibition, becomes embedded in the work in a number of ways. We might consider the reappearance of the Lumière Brothers Danse Serpentine, and the dancer’s body, decade after decade, as a form of time travel. Or its transformation from moving image to YouTube video as an example of the deep time of media,4 unearthed and catalogued. Or perhaps it is the artist herself who is truly the time traveler, tripping in and out of history as a means of reveling in and revealing the unknown.
The artist as natural time traveler might find herself, therefore, on the edge of a black hole. From such a position, according to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, it would be possible to “witness an immensely long time span in the universe […] so far removed from the external time of the surrounding cosmos that she conceivably could witness thousands, millions, or billions of years elapse.”5 From terrestrial, fleshly, floral forms to celestial bodies, the Danse Serpentine becomes the portal for the artist to peer through space and time. Analogy to a Blue Flame suggests just this edge of timeless possibility – the cut-out absent body of the dancer provides a black hole (negative space) through which to observe the endlessly looping fluttering movement that exists on a plane just beyond our present reach.
The strength and voluminousness of the transformed feminine form at once pays tribute to the innovation and inventiveness of modern dancer Loïe Fuller, while celebrating the body’s continuous, amorphous escape from the confines of its contours. Through this porous membrane,6 the artist has only begun to express the exchange of shape and form, natural and ethereal, digital and analog, past and present, present and future.
Kristina Fiedrich, 2016.
Fiedrich is a practicing artist and scholar, with an undergraduate and MAA degree in visual art (TRU 2005; ECUAD 2012) and a MA in Comparative Media Art (SFU 2015). Alongside her art practice, Fiedrich has taught Drawing, Illustration and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, was a founding member of the Journal of Comparative Media Arts Editorial Committee and the Artistic Program Manager for ISEA2015. She is currently the Arts Programmer for the City of New Westminster.
1 Jacques Rancière, “The Dance of Light,” in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul. (New York: Verso Books, 2013), 94.
2 Marie Louise Fuller. “United States Patent: # - Garment for Dancers,” April 17 1894.
3 Rancière, 96.
4 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press, 2006), 2.
5 Joel Hunter, “Time Travel,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed September 20, 2016, http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/
6 Gilles Deleuze, “Athleticism,” in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith. (London, New York: Continuum, 2003), 12.
A woman dances alone on a stage. The swathes of fabric bellowing and collapsing around her as she moves; spinning, swirling. From one moment to the next, the dancer’s body becomes engulfed by the folds of fabric, disappearing from view, while simultaneously expanding, transforming and breathing beyond her skin. Described by art critic Mallarmé as resembling giant petals, butterflies or a conch shell unfurling1, the dancer, suspended in place and time, is an apparition. Her body, disproportionate and malleable, is an abstraction of flesh and movement, taking up and traveling through space.
For most students of art history, this is a familiar film – the Lumière Brothers Danse Serpentine, c. 1896. Attributed to American modern dance pioneer and inventor Loïe Fuller, the serpentine dance was enhanced by Fuller’s patented garment, which allowed dancers to become subsumed almost entirely by the triangular shaped, light-weight material.2 The garment, guided by the dancer’s body, expands the curvilinear lines of the feminine form, while also challenging the shape and proportions of what was considered a beautiful figure. As Rancière noted, this is a new body.3
Now, ahead by a century. Vancouver-based artist Andrea Taylor takes up the image of the serpentine dancer, exploring the varied embodied forms through photography, paintings, drawings, moving-image and sculptures in Voices of Unknown Origin (AKA the Time Traveler). Deconstructing and decomposing the Lumière Brothers moving-image into over 200 stills, Taylor has returned the pulsing, swirling figure – once ethereal and gauzy – to an on-going series of mysterious bodily/fleshy masses. Each still becomes an instant for another reality, another space, another body. Opaque, weighted and voluminous, the dancing figure begins to resemble botanical, floral and invertebrate shapes. The metamorphosis of the feminine form as it becomes a new, unknown body, full of potential.
The unknown, as a catalyst for making, is present in Taylor’s work. Through process and repetition, the spiraling dancing body is re-presented through a variety of media. A series of palladium prints delves into the archaeology of media, restoring an archaic process and fixing the body in space and time. Returning the moving image to a former technology, Taylor upends the hierarchy of technological systems, and produces, reproduces and transforms the image. Is the unknown more knowable through repetition? Will this body, this figure, this organic feminine form, come into focus?
By slowing down, or reversing the movement of the dancer, the artist is asking the viewer to consider another time, another moment – whether past, present or future. Time travel, as suggested by the title of the exhibition, becomes embedded in the work in a number of ways. We might consider the reappearance of the Lumière Brothers Danse Serpentine, and the dancer’s body, decade after decade, as a form of time travel. Or its transformation from moving image to YouTube video as an example of the deep time of media,4 unearthed and catalogued. Or perhaps it is the artist herself who is truly the time traveler, tripping in and out of history as a means of reveling in and revealing the unknown.
The artist as natural time traveler might find herself, therefore, on the edge of a black hole. From such a position, according to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, it would be possible to “witness an immensely long time span in the universe […] so far removed from the external time of the surrounding cosmos that she conceivably could witness thousands, millions, or billions of years elapse.”5 From terrestrial, fleshly, floral forms to celestial bodies, the Danse Serpentine becomes the portal for the artist to peer through space and time. Analogy to a Blue Flame suggests just this edge of timeless possibility – the cut-out absent body of the dancer provides a black hole (negative space) through which to observe the endlessly looping fluttering movement that exists on a plane just beyond our present reach.
The strength and voluminousness of the transformed feminine form at once pays tribute to the innovation and inventiveness of modern dancer Loïe Fuller, while celebrating the body’s continuous, amorphous escape from the confines of its contours. Through this porous membrane,6 the artist has only begun to express the exchange of shape and form, natural and ethereal, digital and analog, past and present, present and future.
Kristina Fiedrich, 2016.
Fiedrich is a practicing artist and scholar, with an undergraduate and MAA degree in visual art (TRU 2005; ECUAD 2012) and a MA in Comparative Media Art (SFU 2015). Alongside her art practice, Fiedrich has taught Drawing, Illustration and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, was a founding member of the Journal of Comparative Media Arts Editorial Committee and the Artistic Program Manager for ISEA2015. She is currently the Arts Programmer for the City of New Westminster.
1 Jacques Rancière, “The Dance of Light,” in Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul. (New York: Verso Books, 2013), 94.
2 Marie Louise Fuller. “United States Patent: # - Garment for Dancers,” April 17 1894.
3 Rancière, 96.
4 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward and Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. (Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press, 2006), 2.
5 Joel Hunter, “Time Travel,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed September 20, 2016, http://www.iep.utm.edu/timetrav/
6 Gilles Deleuze, “Athleticism,” in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith. (London, New York: Continuum, 2003), 12.