taylorhayesmfa-blog

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I started a series of paper mache collages with no cardboard backing at all. These are made up of drawings and papers from my everyday life to hopefully create some sort of contemporary still life. Because they are just paper, I can carve through the surface to create holes and muddle the surface. The idea behind these would be to create a large batch of them, collecting papers, thoughts, and drawings of everyday life.

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Abstract sketches that document pieces of my daily life. A still life of sorts. I am beginning to incorporate such sketches into my collage works and bigger paintings. 

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I have been working on some smaller, simpler collage contemplations using pieces of cardboard, paper, and torn pieces from my larger works. 

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Trying some found papers assemblages starting on newsprint instead of cardboard to create a more free flow structure that’s less rigid. 

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Making some exciting progress on this larger paper mache / found paper assemblage piece. I peeled the paper mache layers from the cardboard backing which revealed tiny holes and translucent layers of paper and provides more of a floating, freed feeling to the piece versus the stiff cardboard. Now I am imagining this piece to be walked around and seen from both sides so I may continue to work on the front and the back.

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The Abstract Works of Tomashi Jackson & Mark Bradford

Taylor Hayes | Group One | Fall 2017 | Advisor: Laurel Sparks

Abstract art has traditionally been a genre that refutes or denies political expression, but artists Mark Bradford and Tomashi Jackson implement what Bradford calls “social abstraction” — not abstraction that is inward looking but “abstraction that [looks] out at the social and political landscape” (Tomkins, Jenkins). By giving value to materials of every day life in the inner city and employing the formalist and intuitive nature of abstraction, Bradford and Jackson present a complex visual representation of race and socioeconomics for people of color in the United States.

Born and raised in South Los Angeles, Mark Bradford grew up with a single mother who owned a beauty salon in an all-black neighborhood until he was 11, when they moved to an all-white neighborhood. Bradford’s art practice goes back to childhood but he insists, “it’s not an art background. It’s a making background” of growing up around other makers and working in his mother’s salon after high school (Art21). From early on, he used the materials found around the salon such as the paper rectangles used for permanents, bobby pins, and hair dyes— effectively engaging the discarded materials of urban life in the inner city. His process continued when he began scavenging neighborhood ad posters to use as paper pulp material. While collecting materials, Bradford is thinking “about all the white noise out there in the streets: all the beepers and blaring culture—cell phones, amps, chromed-out wheels, and synthesizers. I pick up a lot of that energy in my work, from the posters, which act as memory of things pasted and things past. You can peel away the layers of papers and it’s like reading the streets through signs” (The Broad). Over time, Bradford’s deeply layered materials transformed his abstract work into complex visuals of race, class, and orientation; today his art practice has grown to include video, installation, and photography in addition to his work in printmaking and collage.

Bradford’s mixed media painting, Scorched Earth (2006), was created after researching the Tulsa race riot of 1921—one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States that was burnt to the ground after a white mob started attacking African-American residents and businesses. The painting is made from billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, and bleach on canvas to resemble an aerial map of a location that has been blacked out, a topography of ruins. The Broad gallery which houses the painting adds that “the blackness of this land mass resonates on many levels: black as in the demographics of this neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma… black, as the title suggests, meaning burnt or scorched; black as in redacted; and black as in nothingness” (The Broad). Bradford’s abstract process mimics the construction and deconstruction of African American culture in the United States— Bradford explains that “my practice is décollage and collage at the same time. Décollage: I take it away; collage: I immediately add it right back. It’s almost like a rhythm. I’m a builder and a demolisher. I put up so I can tear down” (Art21).

Tomashi Jackson was born in Houston, Texas but raised in Los Angeles, California; while studying painting and printmaking at Yale University, Jackson noticed that the language Josef Albers used in his instructional text Interaction of Color mirrored the rhetoric of racialized segregation found in the transcripts of education policy and civil rights court cases fought by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. As a result, Jackson started to use the properties of color perception as a tool for investigating the history of school desegregation in the United States and the contemporary resegregation of public space and violence against the black body. Both Marshall and Albers concluded that color perception is not static but instead is relative and that how a viewer perceives color is determined by the color nearest to it—tools that Jackson employs in her work through the placement of different colors, textures, and materials. ​​

The Subliminal is Now is the exhibit Jackson created in response to her research findings, a series of large-scale abstract works that “connect past and present, formalism and intuition, languages of color theory and human rights legislation” (Shabaka). Jackson combines painting with sculpture, textile, embroidery, printmaking, and photography thoughtful media to comment on the “materiality of resources and how value is created” (Puleo). The body is always present in Jackson’s work— implications of bodies and the law come together through the employment of painted and collaged gauze, a translucent material most often used for repairing injured flesh. The provocative titles, such as “The School House Rock (Brown, et. al. v Board of Education of Topeka) (Bolling v Sharpe (District of Columbia))” reference landmark court cases which addressed civil rights and racial segregation, Jackson evokes the socio-political history of protest and struggle on the part of black people in the United States. The Subliminal is Now investigates color as a vehicle for painting, complex narrative, and emotion meanwhile interrogating the subliminal impact of color perception on the value of human life in public space.

While both artists search for found materials from the street and address institutionalized racism in the United States, Bradford works to rediscover the past as opposed to Jackson who juxtaposes hints of the past with contemporary events. In reference to my current practice, the value of every day, discarded materials and substrates becomes increasingly important to tell the story of a contemporary time and place. Found papers and materials add a complexity to the work and a visual image that becomes abstracted through layers of additive and subtractive processes. Both artists also address painting and collage in a way that does not sit on the wall that same way a traditional canvas might. Jackson’s paintings “hang from rods that position the works away from the wall. When flooded with natural or artificial light, the paintings evoke stained glass, immersing the body of the viewer with their scale” (Art Haps). Bradford’s size and scale are all-encompassing, “twelve feet high by twenty feet long… [the] physical presence [overpowers] everything else in the room” (Tomkins). In my next works, I intend to push the scale to form larger gestures and consider the form of the substrate I create to be more a part of the process instead of simply painting a scene or image on a canvas

Works Cited

Jenkins, Barry. “Mark Bradford.” Interview Magazine, 12 June 2017.

“Politics, Process, and Postmodernism: Mark Bradford.” Art21, 2009, art21.org/read/​​mark-bradford-politics-process-and-postmodernism/.

Puleo, Risa. “The Linguistic Overlap of Color Theory and Racism.” Hyperallergic, 14 ​​Dec. 2016, hyperallergic.com/345021/the-linguistic-overlap-of-color-theory-and-​​racism/.

Shabaka, Onajide. “On Documentary Abstraction and the Art Practice of Tomashi ​​Jackson.” Sugarcane Magazine, 5 Oct. 2017, sugarcanemag.com/2017/10/on-​​documentary-abstraction-and-the-art-practice-of-tomashi-jackson/.

The Broad, www.thebroad.org/art/mark-bradford.

“Tomashi Jackson: The Subliminal is Now.” Art Haps , Tilton Gallery, www.arthaps.​​com/m/show/tomashi-jackson-1.

Tomkins, Calvin. “What Else Can Art Do? The Many Layers of Mark Bradford's Work.” ​​The New Yorker, 22 June 2015.

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Transforming a large former bike box into a substrate with paper mache. Let the layers begin! This piece is the largest yet, 4.5 ft by 3.5 ft, and I plan to shape the form or create holes as the layers continue.

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Progression of the latest piece I am constructing out of cardboard, paper mache, and acrylic. Eventually, this piece will float a few inches off the wall, creating shadows from the strange structure. It is roughly 4 ft x 3.5 ft and by far the biggest piece I've made so far this semester. Excited to see how this continues to evolve.

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So far this is my new favorite piece which I made by peeling this apart from the box shape it once was constructed from. The holes were left behind and I reconstructed them, stapled, and left the empty spaces. This piece has paper mache, screenprints, acrylic, spray paint, and marker all mixed up in it. Next I want to figure out how to do more of this but bigger.

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Darkness & Mystery in the Works of Lee Bontecou & Odilon Redon

Taylor Hayes | Group One | Fall 2017 | Advisor: Laurel Sparks

​Created a century apart and constructed of dissimilar mediums, the works of artists Lee Bontecou and Odilon Redon are closely related in their conceptual approach to imagery and creative process. Contemporary sculptor, painter, and printmaker, Lee Bontecou, gained attention in the 1960s for her wall relief sculptures while Odilon Redon is a lesser known painter and printmaker of the Post-Impressionist era more recognized as a Symbolist and predecessor to the Surrealist movement. Born in different countries with one hundred year to separate them, these artists were both uniquely effected by technology, scientific innovations, and the brutality of war; therefore, both artists chose to pull from “within” when creating work, inventing worlds of fantasy centered around darkness, the grotesque, and the sublime.

​Born in France in 1840, Redon studied etching and lithography until serving in the army in the Franco-Prussian War after which he moved to Paris and continued his work in lithography and charcoal. Redon worked exclusively in black and white printmaking until he was fifty, at which time he explored oil and pastel but with the same attention to light and mystery he developed in his lithography. Bontecou was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island, attended the Art Students League in New York from 1952 to 1955, followed by a period of residence in Rome. Upon her return, Bontecou created lightweight welded frameworks and filled them with wire mesh, canvas, and muslin to mimic the depth and layers of a painting.

​In Bontecou’s Untitled 1962, a range of subtle grays, blacks and browns are organized around a void that opens from the inside of the form, creating an illusion of infinite space from within. The paintings are large in size, similar to many abstract expressionist works of the time, and are designed to hang on a wall. The deep illusion of space and darkness in Bontecou’s works “produce cosmic holes, floating eyes, gas masks, and bleak terrains… that break boundaries between humans, animals, plants, and machines” (Hadler 23). Inspired by memories of war and modern advancements, Bontecou combines found scrap materials and organic shapes to juxtapose the natural and the industrial. The resulting geometric forms resemble machines with a surprisingly handmade touch.

​In Redon’s The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity, the idea of the supernatural and ambiguous space is enhanced through the organ shaped like a balloon that looks upward toward the divine, taking with it a dead skull. Redon is known for his “hybrid creatures, oscillating between human beings, animals, and plants, with melancholy, grotesque faces” (Nardi 6). Redon used balloons in his prints to create a modern image of the spiritual experience, a parody of religious and mythological images. During the Franco-Prussian war, balloons became a national symbol of France and were used to communicate and even escape, just as Redon’s imaginative prints both referenced and escaped the real world.

​For both Redon and Bontecou, light and shadow were used as a tool for evoking mood and the expressive quality of chiaroscuro, creating a sense of fantasy and mystery in their work. For Bontecou, black was the starting point for it all—particularly the drawings she produced with black soot by turning down the oxygen on her acetylene torch— a process that requires quick, agile movements and whole body coordination. Bontecou became fascinated with gradations of light and dark, often using mesh in her relief sculptures to reproduce the layered effects that she once created with lithographs. The quality of Redon’s work is wrapped up in the power of chiaroscuro and abstract line which becomes clear when noting that he worked in black and white printmaking (known formally as his Noirs) exclusively until he was fifty years old, at which time he began recreating new worlds of color in oil and pastel. In an essay on Redon’s Noirs, Alessandra Nardi points out that “Redon’s fascination with darkness was accompanied by a powerful attraction to the world of the indeterminate, the phantoms of insomnia, and the monstrous dreams and obscure fantasies usually rendered invisible by daylight” (Nardi 1-2).  

​Both artists have characteristics in common with the art movements surrounding them, yet their work cannot be categorized into those movements or even defined easily. Bontecou stayed far from the flatness of the 1960s, seeking inspiration in deep space and implied depth, nonetheless “her works establish a mood, a general current of emotion that requires no explanation” with references to Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism (Ashton 5). Redon is considered a Post-Impressionist artist and Symbolist who led the way for the Surrealists but his work is wrapped up more in mystery and logic than surreal imagery. In fact, “Redon's color is so far-out that it catapults him right out of the context of the Post-Impressionist generation and places him in the company of, on the one hand, the Byzantine mosaicists and, on the other hand, the great twentieth-century abstract colorists” (Rosenthal 13).

​Bontecou and Redon had a knack for creating strange worlds of fantasy the viewer had never seen before while referencing hints of real world. Bontecou’s morphing of human, nature, and machine calls out the positive and negative consequences of scientific and technological progress as well as the fear of nuclear war while Redon’s use of hot air balloons and strange unhuman creatures creates a dreamlike quality linked to intriguing technology of his time.

Works Cited

Ashton, Dore. “On Lee Bontecou.” Raritan, pp. 1–12.

Hadler, Mona. “Lee Bontecou and Drawing: From the Real to the Strange.” Women's ​​Art Journal, 2014, pp. 23–32.

Nardi, Alessandra. ““Black is the most essential color”: Odilon Redon’s Noirs.” The Iris: ​Behind the Scenes at Getty, 5 Mar. 2016, ​blogs.getty.edu/iris/black-is-the-most-essential-color-odilon-redons-noirs/.

Rosenthal, Deborah. “Redon: The Subjective World.” New Criterion, vol. 13, no. 4, Dec. ​1994.

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Lately I have been wanting to transform cardboard as a material and break down the fibers so that it is soft like fabric or paper. I am imagining this would hang in the center of a room or a few inches off the wall to create shadows from the strange holes and shapes.

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In his article “Cultural Confinement”, Robert Smithson argues that, “a work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world” (Smithson 248). The relationship between artist, artwork, and audience is always inevitably strained in some way depending on the context of the relationship, however there are circumstances in which artists can overcome those limitations and push the audience to do more than “consume” the art. Nari Ward’s exhibit Sun Splashed, is a unique example of an artist breaching the fourth wall between art and audience through the use of unlikely found materials, interactive elements, and blatant political messaging.

Click the link to read the full paper.

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Using rust, decay, and decomposition, these artists tell stories, illuminate histories, and prompt us to think about beauty in new ways. Whether reclaiming discarded materials or employing a camera as witness to institutionalized neglect, contemporary artists can reverse deterioration—or even employ it themselves—to raise awareness and transform objects and communities alike.

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Tiny paper mache studies made from used cardboard boxes and papers.

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Studio shots: turning a cardboard box into a "canvas" using paper mache, acrylic paint, collage, and mixed media materials.

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Mentor Meet-Up / Michelle Bollinger

I drove up to Chicago to meet with my mentor, Michelle Bollinger, and received very helpful feedback about my most recent works.

I brought three mixed media painting on mdf panel and three paper mache contructed pieces made from found papers and cardboard.

Michelle was very encouraging about the paper mache pieces. Some key feedback points:

There is something nice about the built surface of the paper mache pieces versus the applied surface of the mdf panels.

The soft edges of the paper mache pieces are a nice break from the hard edges of wood panel or canvas.

Continue playing with the form of the paper mache canvases - let it wrinkle up, deteroriate, mishape, and build up further in other areas.

Play with tearing up, cutting into, and otherwise being able to look down into these forms.

Go with the idea of the painting being off the wall.

The minimal color palette works well with the rich texture of the found papers underneath. These pieces are more breathable than the other works, which are built up all over to the same level.

Artists to research:

Emily Gerard

Selena Trepp

Angelo Taro