Ryder Mcentyre, Campus Carrier Graphics Editor

It’s impossible to spend too much time staring with open eyes and possibly even a dropped jaw at Katherine Taylor’s show “Causeway”. At the opening of the show, she gave a rather informative talk about the meticulous oil paintings that make up her collection currently on display at the Moon Gallery. She was equally informative and challenging, and spoke plainly about the difficulties of not only oil painting’s painstaking processes, but also of a postmodern response to dissonance about mankind’s imposed rule on nature and nature’s seemingly indirect Newtonian response to that very imposition. However, her main study as an artist seems to involve a perspective as art object approach, which in the context of her works, is much more compelling than the alternatives.

Taylor tackled almost every aspect of her works in her talk, as if her pieces carried with them both the apparatus to be hung from the white Moon Gallery walls and also an acute self awareness which was at first frustrating, but later, entirely breathtaking. After the show, I attempted to challenge her with the environmentalist politics of her works, which seemed to resonate within the canvases as a response to her continued reference to experiencing, sometimes after the fact, traumatic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. (A neat yet somber fact is that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina just experienced its 9 year anniversary around the same time of the opening of this particular show.)

One of the pieces which particularly shook me was “Freeboard”. T he giant painting of a beautifully weathered stucco swimming pool showing the hard-to-see, yet, from another angle, hard-to-miss reflection of a bright and almost shiningly photorealist aluminum stepladder. This juxtaposition of chiaroscuro’d landscapes and photorealistic details further elicits the dissonance she strives for and serves to complicate the overall work in a rather interesting way.

Perhaps most devastatingly brilliant about the show, however, is her eponymous piece Causeway. This piece depicts an artificial horizon line, created by a man-made, literal causeway. The gradations of color from gray to almost powdery white create a mood and tone that is at times threatening, and other times completely tranquil. The eye is drawn to the horizon line, inevitably, as man-made concrete harshly separates the viewer from the natural world. The beauty of her work, I believes, lies just before and on the horizon, where nature and mankind meet and yet man is divided from nature by their own means.  This is rooted in her ability to fixate on these normally mundane sights in a normally fast-paced movement through a three dimensional horizontal space which has just been ravaged by Mother Nature.

While her oil on canvas pieces retain traditional oil-painting tropes while eschewing and complicating ideas of perspective of environment, her oil on aluminum works display harsh geometric abstraction — not abstraction like Rothko, but abstraction of perspective. The cold and sterile lines between oil colors applied to the aluminum and the light-utilizing gradients of the aluminum itself garner a reaction of awe. The constantly shifting colorizations of the aluminum as medium do an incredible job of increasing the volume of her message of perspective as art object.

Katherine Taylor seems to have reinvented and revived oil painting from a tired old white male portraiture to a refreshing take on environmental disasters and the people who live through them. Her work exists in a space where perspective itself is the art object; where mankind’s imposition on nature has finally reached a Newtonian response to a degree of rapid change in the natural world by man-powered forces and constructs. She succeeds in evoking a humanist tone, in which she focuses on the perspectives of human beings who have experienced natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita are about to begin rehabilitating their customized concrete and sky worlds.