Maggie Taylor
A World of Her Own, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2018
Before Breakfast, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2017
Dream Pool, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2018
Later, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2017
Ship of Fools, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2018
Teetotum, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2017
The Toast of Last Night, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2018
Through the Looking-Glass, archival inkjet print, dimensions variable, 2017
Artist Statement
Since 1997, I have created all of my images with the use of computers, flatbed scanners, and small digital cameras. I see the scanner as a type of light-sensitive device that is not much different than a digital camera. My initial digital explorations actually led me to use the scanner in place of the digital camera because of cost and expediency. But in the long run, I have been visually enchanted by the strange, glowing images that I am able to capture with these scanned slices of time. In addition to incorporating small objects that appeared in my earlier photographs, I also have begun to include many 19th Century photographs. Scans of daguerreotypes and tintypes I find on the internet and in antiques shops have become my cast of characters and have helped to shape my sense of pictorial space.
I usually begin working with either an old photograph or a small object that I find intriguing. After a simple scan and some retouching, I start to play with a variety of options for the image, hardly ever beginning with a well-defined idea of what I want the finished image to contain. Sometimes an object from one image does not fit, so I try it in another image and . . . voila! It helps me to work with a small group of three-to-four images around the same time. Keeping an open mind and retaining all the layers in the image, I can recombine and alter the content, color, and feel of an image over and over again until I am happy with it. Many times I use a small camera to quickly capture a cloud, a swath of grass, or a larger object. Running back inside to my computer, I can isolate the element and add it to my composition.
I make all of my own inkjet prints in my studio. Viewing the image on the screen, with all of its color and vibrancy, is very seductive. Then comes the task of trying to get the print to match as closely as possible. After a few weeks (well, sometimes a month or two), I make a test print of the image on my Epson inkjet printer. This print usually looks terrible and requires more work, both on color and content. I go through quite a lot of paper-making final adjustments, moving a hand here or there, adding a string or a shadow, changing the contrast of a cloud, and so on.
About the Artist
Maggie Taylor lives amid the Spanish moss and live oaks at the edge of a small swamp on the outskirts of Gainesville, Florida. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961, and moved to Florida at the age of 11. She spent her childhood watching countless hours of situation comedies and science fiction on television; later, she received a philosophy degree from Yale University and, a little later, a master’s degree in photography from the University of Florida.
Maggie Taylor has exhibited her digital composites widely, in solo and two-person shows as well as group exhibitions at galleries and museums across the United States and abroad. In 2018, she exhibited at Littlejohn Contemporary, New York, New York; Bennett Galleries, Knoxville, Tennessee; Catherine Couturier Gallery, Houston, Texas; and Blanca Berlin Galeria, Madrid, Spain.
Among the many museums that have collected Maggie Taylor’s work are The Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; The George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville, Florida; Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; The High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California.
A two-time finalist for the New Orleans Photo Alliance’s Clarence John Laughlin Award, Maggie Taylor won the 2004 Santa Fe Center for Photography Project Competition. She also has received a State of Florida Individual Artist’s Grant and a grant from The Ultimate Eye Foundation.
Maggie Taylor’ work is featured in Maggie Taylor’s Landscape of Dreams (Adobe Photoshop Master Class Series), Peachpit Press, Berkeley, 2005; Solutions Beginning with A, Modernbook Editions, Palo Alto, 2007; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Modernbook Editions, 2008; Album, Edizioni Siz, Verona, Italy, 2009; No Ordinary Days, University Press of Florida, 2013; and Through the Looking-Glass, Moth House Press, Gainesville, Florida, 2018.
Littlejohn Contemporary New York
Magie Taylor Artist (Video)
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