s t a n d p o i n t

Michael Taylor

The Seeker - Potential objects of fascination

21st May – 3rd July 2004

 

 

 

 

This strategy is echoed in his technique; the smaller pen and ink works are abstracted and deconstructed readings of the same images, while in the larger works the colours bleed and merge, creating amorphous pools of guessed-at forms.

Yet it is in the cropping of the image that Taylor’s work achieves the full extent of its power. A child reaches up to be picked up by someone and the viewer assumes a reassuring father figure. Crop out the adult and we are faced with an image that appears redolent of menace. Now that only the hands of the adult are visible, we fear for the child’s safety and doubt the innocence of the image. In a group of three black and white images, we become fixated by the unseen others that lurk at the edge of the frame and are unsure as to whether what we are seeing is aggressive or passive.


In this act of cropping and recropping, framing and reframing, Michael Taylor’s work makes a voyeur out of the viewer. The spectator becomes one who bears witness to the peripheral narratives, the stories that lie beyond the frame.

—Rob Weiss

Link: www:pauperspublications.com

 

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In this show by London based artist Michael Taylor, the viewer is the seeker in the title; searching for a coherent anchoring point from which to glean meaning.

The photo-based images, rendered in pen and ink, as large inkjet prints and as colour silk-screens, are workings and reworkings , both aesthetically and conceptually, of the type of snapshot photograph that we all might have in our homes.


It is, however, the disquieting aspects of this approach that makes this show worth a second look. The images are all taken from the same photographs, in which a child is lost in play surrounded by the randomness of the snapshot; the visual noise that marks the amateur photograph. The image is then cropped repeatedly to create new viewpoints, and it is in looking at these that the viewer is asked to reconsider the perceived innocence of the family photograph. A narrative is formed, almost unconsciously; who is the man standing by the young child, what are his intentions? An unrecognisable and unfocused shape in the foreground suddenly becomes a thing of menace, a potential threat to the unity of the image. Yet in Taylor’s work, there seems to be an equal emphasis on beauty; the inkjet prints, in particular, shine with a painterly quality and a depth and intensity of colour. The overriding theme in these works seem to be an insistence on the concept of peripheral narratives. Taylor’s interest lies in what occurs outside of the frame, as an ellipsis, and he asks what happens when the frame is shifted from its expected position. Taylor’s work is reacting against the cultural prominence of the singular meaning, the quest for easy readings. Here narrative is constantly and consistently being broken up to provide multiple readings of equal validity.