Tracy Marie Taylor

The Letdown visualizes the complexities of my identity as artist-mother and connects to broader cultural conversations about motherhood. Through my art, I survey the assisted reproductive and breast feeding technologies that were my companions during struggles to become a mother and in my efforts to sustain new life.

In this series, I use computer programming to visually reinterpret the data collected from twelve months of breast pumping into delicately hued and precisely delineated discs. The resulting artworks are metaphors for time, the often invisible labor of domestic care work and the distance created by technology. Together these pieces give shape to physical and creative tensions. They give voice to the millions of women who have struggled to become mothers and honor the under-valued labor of motherhood.

Using audio surveillance technologies provided by a commercial baby monitor, I capture my baby’s cries and translate that data into visual shapes. The sound waves loop back on themselves in a 360-degree rotation. The result is vaguely reminiscent of the shape of a flower; each burst of sound looks like a petal. The shapes are then stacked vertically to create three-dimensional forms. The forms are carved out of High Density Urethane using a Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) router. They are painted a high gloss, dark, gun-metal gray. The color is chosen to stand in stark opposition to the white gallery walls, to scream for your attention, the way a baby demands to be heard.

The initial purpose for this project was to try to find visual patterns that could be more easily interpreted. However, I quickly realized this was a fool’s game; the visual patterns are as indiscernible as his sounds. Therefore, what remains is a visual record of a moment in time; a beautiful reminder of those sleepless nights when the world was comprised of just my son and myself.

“Sleep Regression” is a series of intimate works that were painted in the space of nap times and record the moments I watched my son while working in my home studio. The paintings’ small size and blue palette reproduce the video format and color, mimicking the tension between the close, private space of sleep and the distance created by the act of surveillance. The effects are eerie and disturbing images of rest. Lingering in the unconscious state of sleep, the baby’s body looks lifeless. Are these representations of a sleeping child or a fetus? These works are thus unusual documents of a baby’s first year of life–odd surrogates for the family photo album.

The gray-scale paintings on the other hand, reinforce the reference to the sonogram, creating layers of distance. The painting series thus portrays an interesting paradox: the increasing stylistic abstraction chronicles my catharsis after years of fertility struggles as I move further away from my past sorrows, yet the works also reflect a turn inward and become more specific to my body (womb) and more private. The delineated forms in black, white, and grey look like the thermal imaging of a birth–drapery resembles the uterine wall, a dark ground morphs into a vaginal opening.

"The Mountain Meadows Massacre stands without a parallel amongst the crimes that stain the pages of American history. It was a crime committed without cause or justification of any kind to relieve it of its fearful character... When nearly exhausted from fatigue and thirst, [the men of the caravan] were approached by white men, with a flag of truce, and induced to surrender their arms, under the most solemn promises of protection. They were then murdered in cold blood."
–William Bishop, Attorney to John D. Lee

On September 11, 1857 Mormon militia members disguised as Native Americans attacked the Francher-Baker wagon train, resulting in the mass slaughter of one hundred and twenty men, women and children. This mixed media installation is an artistic interpretation of the massacre site. A collaged image of the sky, taken at the massacre site, is projected onto the sculpture from above. In the image, ominous storm clouds approach from the right and interrupt what was otherwise a serenely sunny day. The intricately varied layers of Plexiglas cause the light from above to reflect chaotically onto the surrounding walls, creating a shattered effect. This reflective aspect of the work is meaningful in several ways. It references the multiple, conflicting perspectives in this story and serves as a metaphor for the shattered lives that were a result of the massacre.

The true American cowboy is a dying breed. "The new breed" was coined in the 1970’s to describe a new kind of rodeo rough stock competitor (bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding and bull riding) who lacked the history and background of the true original cowboy. These contestants are young, often from an urban background, and choose rodeo as the outlet to show off their athletic prowess. The vast majority of them have college educations and most have never worked on an actual cattle ranch. In the spirit of the Wild West Shows made popular by Buffalo Bill Cody, these “new breed” competitors engage in a choreographed dance where the goal is to dominate and control their mount. In the same way that an actor performs a role on stage, these men perform an extremely sexualized act that signifies what it means to be “masculine.” Beyond the performative aspects of the competition, I aim to capture the competitor’s true emotions in the seconds before the performance begins. I am especially interested in photographing behind the chutes and focusing my attention on the rider’s expressions, movements and hand gestures as he practices his moves or in the last seconds before he is released from the gate on his bucking mount. I am looking for those fleeting moments when the competitor’s guard is down, and for an instant, he exposes his vulnerabilities, which he so desperately tries to hide.

Using the cowboy as my central character and the western landscape as my stage I synthesize personal narratives with collected myths. My new fictions break down the field of assumptions that deal with the construction of gender identity and the failures that occur between male and female roles. In the Falling/Failing series, I utilize the image of the cowboy who cannot stay on his horse in order to undermine the antiquated myth of the American male. These paintings expose the feelings of inadequacy men deal with living in a post-feminist era. The figure of the cowboy, enveloped in a suffocating landscape of flowers, emanates a profound loneliness, portraying how relations between men and women remain helplessly intertwined yet insoluble. I think a critical perspective on the notion of the cowboy as hero is very timely and relevant, give the resurrection of this old archetype in the constructed image of George W. Bush and his push for war after 9/11. The current agenda to dominate and eliminate reflects the history of the cowboy on a global scale.

Is there some correlation between the falling of a cowboy and the blooming of a flower? Out of the dust of the fallen cowboy and the arid frontier, comes the efflorescence of a new hero in the character of Vienna, a wildly proud saloonkeeper in the western cult classic, Johnny Guitar. The Vienna Series points to the new postfeminist superwoman; the paintings are taken from stills which exemplify this new hero type. Vienna is shown displaying compassion, grace under fire, as well as ferocious conviction.

The Red Series was inspired by the Salman Rushdie novel, "Shame". The central character in the novel, Sufia Zinoba, is a young woman born into a family of corrupt male politicians who are incapable of feeling any shame for their continued misdeeds. Sufiya has the unfortunate affliction of absorbing all of their unfelt shame and carrying it inside her as if it were her own. Like a good daughter, she dutifully soaks it all up like a sponge and the shame manifests as a blush that is so intense that she breaks into purulent sores and burns anyone who touches her.

At first glance, In Continued Conversation with a Deceased Artist appears to be pure abstraction. Organic forms nest and expand into others, seed and grow from various points on the surface. However, the complexities of abstract forms serve to indicate a connection with something deeper. These are not the purely invented abstractions of Kandinsky, nor are they the reductive forms of Mondrian or Halley. In Continued Conversation with a Deceased Artist is processed abstraction. One second of film is extracted and expanded into twenty-nine individual paintings and then those paintings are animated back into video. An intimacy is created between filmmaker, painter and animator, establishing an extended and laborious process to reflect upon the filmmaker's original vision. I am acting as an interpreter, breaking down one language and reconstructing it in another, holding the sense of the structure together with my understanding of both. Like the child's game of "telephone", something is lost and something is gained in translation. Gone is the sense of realism, and with it, the illusion of life. What remains is a sense of forms that have passed through space, that the surface of the animation, at least for a moment, was insistent on noting the world's physicality. In Continued Conversation with a Deceased Artist is a séance of sorts; a dialogue with a ghost. The formal languages of painting and animation are used to converse with the deceased filmmaker, my grandfather. Some topics cannot be broached through words and are lost to time due to age, gender, generational gaps in understanding, and, finally, death. The artifact left to mine is the urge to create art. I try to see through the filmmaker's eyes, attempting to gain understanding of what it was he was thinking, feeling, and experiencing. The process of translating between film, painting and video animation is wish fulfillment, an attempt to establish a common thread between grandfather and granddaughter.

Resulting as a new manifestation of the ideas expressed in The Red Series, Shame is a collaboration between myself and two modern dancers, Laura Chiaramonte and Heather Kroski. This project was also inspired by the novel "Shame" as well as a 1970's super-8 film of a woman struggling with her too short skirt. The dancers use the young woman's uncomfortable fidgeting as a starting point for creating movements that expressed their own feelings toward being trapped within the female body, and their experience with female shame. The dancers pull at their hair, fidget uncontrollably, expose themselves, and then self-consciously cover themselves up. Using Corel Painter, I have digitally painted frame by frame over video footage of the dancers movement where the feeling of shame seems to be heightened. Performed live with the video serving as a backdrop, the turbulence of shame within the bodies of the dancers is transmitted through the irrational frequencies of the music, which in turn is received in the body of the audience.

House deals with the complexities of being a western volunteer in a so-called "third world country", and the uncomfortable feelings of displacement I experienced upon my return. Unwrapping presents, eating a turkey dinner, posing for family photos around the tree: these are the memories of Christmas that helped shape my childhood. All of these images project themselves through the shuttered windows of a paper representation of a typical suburban American home. However, the audience is not allowed to participate in these festivities, but is forced to look in, like a voyeur, or an outsider. Stark, black and white images of a very different place, culture and people are cast onto the house, enveloping it, giving it shape. These images represent the people I became acquainted with during my time as a volunteer in a Burmese Refugee Camp. When one enters this installation and looks in the window to see the projections inside, their body interrupts these images, casting their own shadow upon the house, thus implicating them in a culture of complacency.

The saccharine smiles in my old family photos paint a portrait of happiness and the ideal American household. These pictures represent the façade my family built around drug and alcohol addiction and the layers of untruthfulness found within. My paintings, through the use of layering images, attempt to look back upon my formative years and uncover the entire truth on every level. The violent powerfully loaded Disney characters represent, in children's terms, how I felt at the time. Fear, anger, confusion and a loss of control are a few of the emotions I hoped to portray to the viewer. By moving into the realm of installation, I've further tried to engage my audience into my work and my world. The white picket fences, which the paintings rest on, represent the fences surrounding the "Utopic" American Household. Once inside the picket fence, the viewer can find the entire truth unseen by the outside community.