Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art exhibition We can only hint at this with words is up April 23-June 25, 2022 on Lonsdale Ave in North Vancouver, BC Canada. Artists Russna Kaur, M.E. Sparks, & Andrea Taylor, curated by Kate Henderson. Sponsored by Parc Retirement Living and North Vancouver Recreation & Cultural Commission. Photo by Rachel Topham Photography.
Andrea Taylor artist statement
My broader artistic practice is an experimental intuitive multi-disciplinary practice. Lately, I’ve been focused on making sculptures, which 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 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.
As a poet and a printer of letterpress books of my own writing, I relate to the sculptures as physical wordless or subliminal poems. I intend my work to do what sculptures often do, which is to act as another body in the room allowing a kind-of interaction or extra-verbal, embodied, subliminal, poetic conversation between sculpture and viewer.
The sculptures are also informed by two powerful female artists, Maria Lassnig who made what she called “body-awareness” paintings and Loïe Fuller who was a patent-holding inventor in the 19th century whose dance, filmed by the Lumière Brothers in 1896, infuses my work. Other artists whose work greatly interests and influences my practice include Phillida Barlow, Eva Hesse, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Franz West, Erin Shirreff, Lee Bontecou, Amy Sillman, Louise Bourgeois and Karla Black all of whose work explores embodied experience in a variety of ways.
Visit the artist on Instagram instagram.com/andreataylorart
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.