Go west! Don't go west! Alison Elizabeth Taylor's bind

Artist Alison Elizabeth Taylor came to the NY Studio School last night to talk about her work, which is full of contradictions. It's full of wildness, but also tight control. Sometimes her work, which these days is made of different shades of wood veneer, seems stilted. Sometimes it seems crazy and out of control. Her medium itself demands purposefulness and planning, but her imagery is wild and seems very personal.

When she was talking about her early work, she called them her "anti-history paintings." Of course, to have such a thing means you feel burdened by history. The object of disaffection becomes a kind of controlling factor. Call it a theme.

Taylor comes from Las Vegas. She works in marquetry, which is the practice of creating images by using different kinds of veneer. Like a very labor-intensive paint-by-numbers, but with many more formal problems created by the fact that you're limited to wood. Wood means a limited palette of colors, different grains, and weird things like knots and aberrations.

Marquetry has a long history that goes past the Renaissance, but for almost as long has been a medium relegated to crafts people. When, later on, Taylor spoke of not being comfortable in either the worlds of high or low art, it made absolute sense. She's using a grandpa-in-the-garage medium, and relishing its outsider status. But at the same time, she relies on its historical successes to legitimize its use.

Taylor spoke about Vasari's great history of Renaissance art, and how the historian devoted a lot of energy against artists using marquetry, saying it wasn't appropriate for great work. Alison Elizabeth Taylor took clear pride in reclaiming a lost art, pointing out that marquetry still thrives, but mostly among enthusiasts who trade information in online chat forums.

She showed some of her early work. One piece used a piece of carpet and faux-wood shelf papers (the stuff you line kitchen shelves with). She stopped using shelf papers, she said, because it's so disposable and she didn't feel that way about her characters. She talked about reading Susan Faludi at the time she made her early work, just before she moved on to using actual wood.

The image of Taylor putting down a book of high theory in order to trade arcane details about how to cut wood veneer about captures the tension in her work. She's captivated by the utopianism of the west, especially the weird pseudo-Buckminster Fuller domes and well planned suburbs of her Las Vegas. Commenting on her image of two women fighting over a bra in front of a desert Swiss chalet, she said "Mundane dramas do play out in front of ugly suburban architecture."

"Everybody has good intentions," she said about these ideas of desert utopia. "It doesn't work."

Her work is full of outsiders. People living at the Salton Sea. Abandoned architecture meant to create perfect societies. Teenagers on the outskirts. It's so often about diving through the cracks, and discovering there's someone else there.

To me, her work seems most alive when she's less focused on the failures of utopia than on the people who dream them. The latest work she showed, "Room," is an entire room down in marquetry (depicted in the photo above). It depicts one room in a character's living space. It includes his living space, his workshop, and his business. There's a window to the outside world, where homes are encroaching ever closer to this character's own personal idyll.

In talking about "Room," Alison Elizabeth Taylor's feeling for her character was palpable. She got excited talking about the objects in his house, the photos and tools. She showed slides of the details of the walls she constucted, pointing out a great landscape postcard he character received. (As an aside, I love her landscapes -- she creates real space and texture with the wood that enters an almost spiritual place. Is this connected to the west inside her, too?)

She's fully embraced an illusion. With "Room," she got lost in a character, and not in a way that can be confused with being illusionistic. It's in a way that knows the difference between dreams and reality and is comfortable with each living next to the other.