Artist creates elaborate interiors that at times exude a baroque sensuality and at others resemble Heath Robinson contraptions, out of control kitchens or 'mad professor' laboratories. Investigating the visual world around us, she uses an ever-expanding array of materials that it would be impossible to catalogue.
Throughout January, Jennifer Taylor has been in full time residence at the gallery assembling her most ambitious installation to date. Wyer Gallery has been transformed into a chaotic labyrinth, crammed with a mass of intertwining pipes, mechanisms and found domestic objects.
Taylor creates elaborate interiors that at times exude a baroque sensuality and at others resemble Heath Robinson contraptions, out of control kitchens or 'mad professor' laboratories. Investigating the visual world around us, she uses an ever-expanding array of materials that it would be impossible to catalogue. She makes use of different viewing spaces and apertures to challenge her medium and plays with the language of sculpture by using familiar domestic objects, such as mincers, juicers, vacuum cleaner hoses or washing machine extractors. Within her installations, these objects transcend their original functions as they are transformed into absurd instruments with bizarre or dark tasks to perform and small interactions between objects become excessive and almost farcical.
For her new project, every item of her constructions is sprayed white, inviting the viewer to relate to them in a different way and the installation as a whole becomes part of an extended reality, or a bleached, ethereal reflection of reality. Drained of their real colour, ordinary logic is lost and the viewer is able to be transported to the realm of fiction or the language of dreams where anything is possible. Indeed, the visual intensity of Taylor's spaces, their impossible complexities resemble spaceship scenes from the film Alien, or bring to mind Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive, in which various murderous appliances include a hairdryer that strangles its owner with the power cord and an electric carving knife that spontaneously turns on its user's own arm.
Taylor's work preys on a sense of anxiety that perhaps feeds off this kind of sub-genre of horror film as much as it does off a more rational fear of the mutation of cancer cells or the degeneration of the human mind. And, at their heart, her installations explore that energy which exists at the moment of breakdown or change.
Jennifer Taylor graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007. She has participated in group shows internationally including the prestigious Jen RĂªve , at Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris and, more recently, in Says the Junk in the Yard at Flowers East, London. This will be her first solo show.
Private View 13th February 2008
Wyer Gallery
191 St. John's Hill, London
Free admission