内在逻辑
内在逻辑 Internal Logic
玛姬·泰勒 Maggie Taylor
策展人 / Curator:画 儿 / Hua Er
“是时候了,”海象说,“来谈论很多事情:关于鞋子——和船——和封蜡——卷心菜——和国王——以及为什么海水沸腾般炙热——还有猪是否有翅膀。” 刘易斯·卡罗尔——来自《海象与木匠》
刘易斯·卡罗尔的这句话从多个层面说明了玛姬·泰勒的创作过程。首先,她的影像作品是一生积累的记忆、事物和图像的结果。也许我们也都有一些相似的累积,但玛姬的记忆库与我们的不同之处在于,她能够以数字方式存储、编目和检索这些素材,然后提取出所需要的元素生成令人感到惊讶与熟悉的图像,将它们描述为梦醒时分的静止画面,或许是最恰当的。她的图像在纯粹想象的超现实世界和感官所能及的真实性之间摇摆不定,刘易斯·卡罗尔的开场白很契合玛姬引人注目的新作品,它们既古老又新颖。古老意味着许多插图来自回忆;然而最终的作品看起来却是一派全新景象,并带有演绎,与数年前它们被创造时的境况有所不同。
画面中对尺度和背景的操纵为新的解释和见解的出现提供了空间。她依旧专注于自然历史,分类法,以及古董照片,还有反复出现的云彩、留声机、护目镜和时尚主题(以及许多其他轻微的坚持),玛姬带领我们遨游了她的想象力,那里充满了个人的执着和审美的冲动。这种个人启示的聚宝盆包含了卡尔·荣格所说的我们的集体无意识。玛姬视觉词汇表中的许多素材代表了已经死去或垂死的载体(留声机、旧照片、飞艇等),这一事实进一步证明,这些诗意的渲染旨在成为我们集体记忆中濒临消亡的事物的文化标记。
在一个以惊人速度发展的,朝着明天的技术奇迹飞驰而去的社会中,玛姬的影像作品邀请我们放慢脚步;敢于敬畏,哪怕只是片刻。在她创造的空间里,我们可以自由地让我们的思想游荡、好奇和疯狂地推测。“内在逻辑”突出了玛姬对是什么使图像“起作用”的灵感,以及提供了对这些灵感的形状和轮廓的见解。她深层次的图像档案回归到她的艺术中,是一部传达她多层次想象的词典。每张图像都包含了理解其他图像语料库的关键。
玛姬·泰勒的数字艺术创作是具有象征意义的、吸引人的、令人难以忘怀的后印象。她的每一幅图像都经历了她在工作室严格的反复试验过程——逐层和逐个对象构建。只有通过观看数十幅这样的图像,并与它们共度时光,人们才能开始领悟艺术家通过重复某些图像和比喻而产生的感性和独特的魅力。
“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 extract the desired elements to generate surprising and familiarizing images, which 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 opening quote by Lewis Carroll is certainly fitting for this compelling new work which is as much old as it is new. Old in the sense that many of the illustrations come from memory; yet in the final product they appear as new, with a twist. With a different context from when they were created so may years ago. ……
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 carriers 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.
In a society now moving at break-neck pace, hurtling toward tomorrow’s technological miracles, Maggie’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. ‘Internal Logic’ highlights Maggie’s sense of what makes an image ‘work’ and offers insights into the shape and contours of her inspirations. Her deep archive of images that return to her art are a lexicon through which to communicate her multi-layered imaginings. Each image contains the keys to understanding the corpus of other images.
Maggie Taylor’s digital and esthetic creations are emblematic, afterimages that invite, transport, and are unforgettable. Her 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 and distinct fascinations that emerge through the repetition of certain images and tropes.
2022.08.04