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14/3/2012

Adrien Broom - Cassie Taggart

Tria Gallery, New York

March 15, 2012 - New York, NY: Tria Gallery presents Obscura featuring work by Adrien Broom and Cassie Taggart, on view through April 28, 2012.

"I thought it was a dream; too strange to be real."
Cassie Taggart

Broom creates photographic digital prints; Taggart paints oils on canvas. Their visually and psychologically rich tableaus are filled with fantastical backdrops and eccentric people. Many of the visual references they contain are somewhat obscure and other-worldly. The works of both Broom and Taggart, in their own ways, take the viewer on mysterious and endlessly fascinating journeys into the minds of the little girls these artists once were. But the end results are not altogether innocent. While informed by childhood references, the work is captivating, evocative, and ultimately quite mature.

For Obscura, Broome meticulously staged her models, both human and animal, in a forest setting. With the vagaries of natural light, changing weather conditions and the unpredictability of an outdoor environment, she captured the essence of her characters as she had imagined them. Broom does not rely on photoshop to change what her lens sees.

Taggart's paintings feel both classical and contemporary at the same time, with a mysterious edgy feel to them. Her work can be incredibly detailed, incorporating dozens of small images of books, dolls, birds, rugs, chairs, fabrics and household items within the larger context, or they can be quite simple, but they always have defining elements that bring the viewer back to the inner eccentricities of her work.

Adrien Broom

Adrien Broom is a mostly self-taught photographer with a penchant for the bizarre and the beautiful. She is committed to creating art that is exploratory, communicative, and empowering to the viewer. Her photographs represent a peek into her aesthetic connection to the world around her. Her images often tell stories, exploring conversations between the natural world and western culture through constructed narrative scenes. Her work is oftentimes a throwback to her childhood, and a result of her desire to explore the importance of a child's room.

Regarding the body of work on display in Obscura, Broom states:

To my mind, these images combine two spaces traditionally gendered as 'feminine': the wild, fertile, animal outdoors (as in Gauguin's Tahitian landscapes); and the domestic, feminine interior popular in the 19th century, where the household was seen as protecting the delicate, refined, moral woman from the savage realities of modern urban life. Ruskin has a long tribute to this domestic, pure, unsullied femininity as the core of English womanhood and a therapeutic, healing retreat for the modern man, battered by harsh economic and political realities and in need of a quiet, sanctuary free from all modern ills.

Broom's photos fuse these two opposite forms of traditional femininity - the wild nature and the civilized artifice of the feminine interior, complete with elaborate dresses and vanity table mirrors. The results are hauntingly beautiful, somewhat mysterious, and visually poetic.

Broom received a BA in 3D Computer Animation at Northeastern, studied Fine Art at SACI in Florence, Art History at Christie's in London, and photography at RISD. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Nylon, Relix, Billboard, Marie Claire and W Magazine, just to name a few.

Cassie Taggart

Taggart writes:

I grew up in the house of Aaron Burr's many mistresses - an ancient brownstone that told of the past, and which created in me a sense of existing in multiple places, times, and realities all at the same moment....

I am fascinated by the idea of multiple truths, I want to create them, I want them to thrive in my paintings as they do in life. There is a line we straddle between dream and reality, between one truth and another. Reality is pliable, as any criminal attorney will tell you, and for every perspective there is a different truth.

Taggart's childhood tended toward odd artistic pursuits. She carved tiny flying saucers and sewed a thousand "wee" pillows, each methodically designed and given out to "baffled" relatives. When she was around eight, the streets surrounding her house were closed to traffic (most likely because of some demonstration or protest) and were covered with crisp white paper smeared with bloody animal parts. "It was a hallucinatory sight, an indelible image of the quirks of reality and it has stayed with me. I thought it was a dream, too strange to be real."

Taggart's provocative interiors reflect that "hallucinatory sight" and other memories of her childhood. The evocative tableaus of eccentric interiors with eccentric inhabitants layer humor with tragedy, depravity with purity, and the mundane with the mysterious.

Born in Alexandria, Virginia,Taggart was raised in New York City. She returned to her Virginia to get her BFA in Painting and Printmaking at VA Commonwealth University. Over the past twenty years her work has been exhibited throughout the Washington DC area, the northeast, and in Italy.

It is the mission of Tria Gallery to exhibit a balance of established artists with impressive resumes and exciting young talent, showing representational and abstract work, painting, sculpture, mixed media and installations. The common denominator is that the Tria artist has a unique, authentic voice and a compelling body of work which the directors feel should be given an audience.

Image:
Adrien Broom, "Sentiment", 24 x 36", digital C print, ed. of 10, 2011
Cassie Taggart, "Queen's Ashes", oil on canvas, 24 x 30", 2011

Opening 15 march

Tria Gallery
531 West 25th Street, Ground Floor 5 New York
Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11:00 to 6:00, or by appointment
Admission free

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