Alison Elizabeth Taylor

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibitions exhibition of new works by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, opening on Thursday, September 7 and running through September 30.

Emerging artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor is best known for her narrative paintings that are sharp social critiques. Taylor's modern stories illuminate the estrangement from nature, sexual tensions and violence underlying contemporary American life. The people in her works live out their lives in the culturally barren subdivisions and suburban sprawl of the American west. Culture's castaways, they indulge in modern life's distractions: sex, video games, oversized cars, guns and drugs.

Taylor employs the craft of marquetry-wood veneer inlay, a technique popularized during the reign of Louis XIV and associated with luxury and privilege, to create a dichotomy between subject and surface. On one hand, the opulence of the medium highlights the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. On the other hand, Taylor pays respect to the innate humanity of her characters through her choice of this extraordinarily demanding craft.

The exhibitions exhibition at James Cohan Gallery will consist of 7 new marquetry works. In Roadside, two men hunt from the comfort of their SUV on the outskirts of a subdivision, pointing their guns at two deer grazing in the foreground. The image suggests themes of thoughtlessness, invasion and occupation. Throughout all the works in the exhibition, including Redrock, Swimming Pool, and Morning After Pabco, one senses the dry wit and caustic eye that Taylor brings to the social commentaries she so carefully constructs.

This is the first exhibition at James Cohan Gallery of Alison Elizabeth Taylor, a recent graduate of Columbia University, School of the Arts.