Temporary Stay: Kristen Neville Taylor
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Kristen Neville Taylor’s arrangements used sculpture, found objects, reference materials, along with family heirlooms and knickknacks to build what she describes as “a form of resource library” for her arrangements. With these materials, Taylor was able to establish new relationships through juxtaposition. Architectural elements such as cast blocks, glass, scrap wood, plastic rods, and dresser drawers are brought in tocreate a “system of display”, wherein a connection can be accentuated, interdependence highlighted, or hierarchy demphasized. As with previous installations, Taylor’s arrangements take on shape of a tableau and behave as drawings in sculptural form.
In Ursula Le Guin’s groundbreaking feminist essay “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” the author suggests that stories are containers, or carrier bags, of meaning. Fundamentally feminine rather than masculine, Le Guin’s model for storytelling inspired Neville Taylor to create a series of containers for the Art Alliance organized according to the model of a story arc–
exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Bringing together two- and three-dimensional work, Neville Taylor’s installation challenged the visitor to reconsider our assumptions about nature, narrative, and culture.
Kristen Neville Taylor received her MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University and continues to work in Philadelphia. Her work has been shown at Bunker Hull, Little Berlin, and Vox Populi galleries in Philadelphia, Richard Stockton and Rowan University Art Galleries in New Jersey, and as a part of Expo Chicago. As a curator, she has organized several exhibitions including Landscape Techne at Little Berlin, The Usable Earth at the Esther Klein Gallery, and most recently as co-curator Middle of Nowhere in the Pine Barrens. Taylor is the recipient of the Laurie Wagman Prize in Glass, the Jack Malis Scholarship, and a 2017 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Taylor will be an artist in residence at the Recycled Artist in Residency Program (RAIR) in August and September.
