Blair Taylor “ You Blew It “ by Debora Alanna

Blair Taylor dreams white dreams of bare efficiency colouring consciousness. Little rises of figures in arrested action impale and huddle, reflect and evince sensation. He delineates and miniaturizes his dreams into equal portions, creating language components, meronymy where isolated parts of dreams relate to his entire dream lexicon. The dreamscapes colligate with size and form. Unnervingly smooth with anonymity, Taylor’s ambiguous figures interplay amongst diverse variations of open architectural configurations. The figures, still as statues from the Abu Temple in Tell Asmar composedly contest. Taylor produces drama within dreamy smooth spaces.   

Voyeurs into his dreamworld, we peer into lulling whiteness. Taylor sets his dreams on stark plinths in ordered rows. Taylor’s sculptures can be paralleled to Sandro Bernardi’s assertion about film: 'Il cinema come insiemi infiniti' (infinite sets)[1]. Or scenes like comic book captures that draw tidy, simplified significance with one important dreamed moment, and then another and another. The exhibition space ticks like a silent clock.

Fine, sinister silhouettes summon mysteries’ shadows, contrasting the blanched incidents. Oneiric definition and separation haunts stealthily.  Whitened meandering cords suspend white-painted oval speakers narrating. Taylor whispers his dreams into our ears in two locations on the side and end of the exhibition space. Unlike George Segal’s white peopled vignettes, influenced by John Cage to “connect art with tangible reality”,  [2] sitting down between Taylor’s undertones, the captivation translates the dreamscapes’ without associating to any particular delineation of his sculpted dreams or our awake world.  The auditory sublimates visual wanderings, disengages us from private associations visually presented, developing the pictorial dreams as movie sounds will brings fresh scope to the pictures on screen.

Taylor works small, keeping involvement disconnected in spite of pragmatic building. The events depicted are affectedly dramatic. In her 1999 feature article in Kinema, Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory, film theorist, Laura Rascaroli writes:

For Jung, dreams develop according to an authentic dramatic structure, formed by a phase of exposition, in which setting and characters are presented; by a development of the plot; by a culmination or peripeteia, containing the decisive event; and by a lysis or solution. [3]

Each of Taylor’s works punctuate with some decisive moment, point of intensity. We are obliged to imagine a resolution. Clarity through simplicity details austere incidents and decorum presupposes we accept that drama will result in a resolve. Preoccupied figures situated in architectural isolation are analogous to painter Paul Delvaux’s Dawn over the City (1940). Unconscious solutions wake a dreamer. Like a Surrealist perplexity, Taylor’s sculptures are subterfuge. [4]

Thinking about Taylor’s numerous stair configurations, there is a structural interrelation to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s stage design that transformed Die Tragödie des Teufels (The Tragedy of the Devil) [5] at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich in 2010. This opera transported the “Hungarian Faust”, Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man into an architectural environment dominated by a prominent luminous white staircase. The stairs conceptualized can signify ascension or descending, a substantial symbol illustrating the timeless struggle to forestall tragedy. “Mankind, it seems, is beset with plenty of inherent evil and requires no outside agency to foment more.” [6] Taylor’s work encourages a devilish bias as many of his sculptures are skewered with quiet violence.

From: There are Crimes and Crimes. (Act 1 Scene 2) by August Strindberg (1899)

MAURICE. Well, if we had to answer for our thoughts, who could

then clear himself?

 HENRIETTE. Do you also have evil thoughts?

 MAURICE. Certainly; just as I commit the worst kind of cruelties in my dreams. [7]

Through Taylor’s work we collectively experience different versions of unconscious darkness or “Shadow”, an archetypal representation of what disturbs us, about what we do not want known, what we are pained to know and need to know. His use of white distils, counters malevolence. “When it [shadow] appears as an archetype…it is quite within the possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature…” ^[8] Utilizing objects (spears, swords and flying projections) for which eroticism is symbolically characteristic, ^[9]  Taylor’s sculpted consciousness is as evocative as Uccello St George impaling his Dragon (1456), a 15th century symbolic through and through of male eroticism, killing ‘sin’, personifying ruin. Taylor stills, piercing ruin’s intensity with an arresting perseverance to remember.

Blair Taylor

" You Blew It"

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria  - LAB

22 April - 3 July 2011




[1] Sandro Bernardi, 'Il cinema come insiemi infiniti', Filmcritica, 332 (1982), pp. 98-105.
[2] http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/guggenheim/education/05.html
[3] Serge Lebovici, 'Psychanalyse et cinéma', Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 281 (1948), p. 53
[4] http://www.yuricareport.com/Art%20Essays/SurrealismAndTheUnconscious.html
[5] http://www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com/index.php/installations/die-tragoedie-des-teufels/description
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/arts/03iht-Loomis3.html
[7] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14347/14347-8.txt
[8] C. G. Jung, Aion in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire et al., trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954-79) Vol. 9/2, p. 10.
[9] http://www2.arnes.si/~uljfdv15/library/art06.html