Jennifer Taylor - New Gallery Installation

About

Taylor creates elaborate interiors that at times exude a baroque sensuality and at others resemble Heath Robinson contraptions, out of control kitchens or 'mad professor' laboratories. Investigating the visual world around us, she uses an ever-expanding array of materials that it would be impossible to catalogue. She makes use of different viewing spaces and apertures to challenge her medium and plays with the language of sculpture by using familiar domestic objects, such as mincers, juicers, vacuum cleaner hoses or washing machine extractors. Within her installations, these objects transcend their original functions as they are transformed into absurd instruments with bizarre or dark tasks to perform and small interactions between objects become excessive and almost farcical.

For her new project every item of her construction is sprayed white and then coated in a layer of translucent microcrystalline wax, this sensual material softening objects, making them more visceral and inviting the viewer to relate to them in a different way. Drained of their real colour and distorted with the wax coating, ordinary logic becomes lost and the viewer is transported into the realm of fiction and dreams. Indeed, the visual intensity of Taylor's spaces, their impossible complexities resemble spaceship scenes from the film Alien, or bring to mind Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive, in which various murderous appliances include a hairdryer that strangles its owner with the power cord and an electric carving knife that spontaneously turns on its user's own arm.

Taylor's work preys on a sense of anxiety that perhaps feeds off this kind of sub-genre of horror film as much as it does off a more rational fear of the mutation of cancer cells or the degeneration of the human mind. And, at their heart, her installations explore that energy which exists at the moment of breakdown or change.

Jennifer Taylor graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2007. She has exhibited internationally in group shows including the prestigious Jen Rêve, at Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris and, more recently, in Says the Junk in the Yard at Flowers East, London.