Love Works
Jess Taylor
11
September 2019
11
September
2019
4
October 2019
Gallery 2
Love Works is a series of work exploring the human emotion par excellence, love – as labour, as obligation, as consuming fire, as heavy weight. Recent life events – the loss of a close friend, the birth of a new child, the near implosion of a family unit – have thrown my complicated relationship to love into focus. These works are my attempt to catalogue the ways in which I love, and reconcile them with the pure love archetypes presented throughout my upbringing and by society at large.Using my own image, manipulated, dissected, and hybridised, Love Works draws heavily upon mythological monsters and narratives, cloaking my experiences of love in a shared symbolic language. It is through this shared language that personal experiences become our collective stories, that we are offered the catharsis of seeing language that personal experiences become our collective stories, that we are offered the catharsis of seeing our hearts reflected in monsters, and that unspoken emotions can form part of our societal dialogue.
Exhibition documented by Aaron Rees.
Love Works is a series of work exploring the human emotion par excellence, love – as labour, as obligation, as consuming fire, as heavy weight. Recent life events – the loss of a close friend, the birth of a new child, the near implosion of a family unit – have thrown my complicated relationship to love into focus. These works are my attempt to catalogue the ways in which I love, and reconcile them with the pure love archetypes presented throughout my upbringing and by society at large.Using my own image, manipulated, dissected, and hybridised, Love Works draws heavily upon mythological monsters and narratives, cloaking my experiences of love in a shared symbolic language. It is through this shared language that personal experiences become our collective stories, that we are offered the catharsis of seeing language that personal experiences become our collective stories, that we are offered the catharsis of seeing our hearts reflected in monsters, and that unspoken emotions can form part of our societal dialogue.
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Jess Taylor
Jess Taylor is an early career artist who lives and works on Kaurna land. Taylor's work explores her fascination with fictional horror through primarily digital methods of making, with a focus on concepts of the monstrous, voyeurism, and depictions of female brutality, sadism, and masochism. Taylor sees horror as a genre that interrogates and reveals our darkest cultural norms, and whose women offer powerful tales of suffering, empowerment and retribution. Using her own body and likeness exclusively, Taylor translates her own experiences into the symbolic language of horror, presenting odes to womanhood both complex and contradictory. Recent works have focussed much more intently on Taylor’s own lived experience, seeking to transform pivotal moments into symbolic narrative objects, an attempt to satisfy the very human need to see ourselves in others and be seen in turn. Taylor’s works run the gamut between immersive virtual environments, video, photography, and intricate 3D printed and fabricated objects, extending on the rich history between technology and the terrible.