Carol Taylor-Kearney “Arcadian Dreams”

Atlantic Gallery

poster for Carol Taylor-Kearney “Arcadian Dreams”

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Carol Taylor-Kearney has worked as an artist, arts educator, and curator. A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, her work is part of several public collections including Wells Fargo Bank; Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius , LLP; and Queensborough College/CUNY. Some notable exhibitions include the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia; the Conant Hall Gallery of ETS in Princeton; the NJ State Museum in Trenton; the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington; Jasper Arts Center in Jasper, IN; Lexington Art League in Lexington, KY; Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, CT; Annmarie Gardens in Solomons, MD; and the First Street Gallery, NURTUREart Gallery, St. Francis College Gallery, and the Islip Museum in New York. She has received grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Artist Fellowship, Inc.; and has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center, Peters Valley Craft Center, and the Pouch Cove Foundation in Newfoundland.

Most of us think of windows and doors as access-ways. You stand in one place, look into another. Carol Taylor-Kearney uses them as the supports for her mixed media paintings. Drawing on the work of 19th century artists, Taylor-Kearney employs the technique of hinterglasmalerei (behind the glass painting) on the panes of windows and doors to create multi-layered artworks. These artworks will be on view in an exhibition titled Arcadian Dreams from April 19 - May 14, 2016 at Atlantic Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.

Like her works, Carol Taylor-Kearney is an vibrant visual artist whose small stature is sometimes at odds with her lively energy. Working primarily on found objects like window panes and doors, this little dynamo uses bright colors, layered representational images and mixed media objects to build her paintings. Such a pastiche of materials, ideas and 3-dimensionality can make it difficult to classify her works as they often go beyond the boundaries of what many may consider a traditional picture. Her images can be akin to animation cells, yet they rarely appear to tell full stories. Instead they seem more like snippets from stream of consciousness, meditation, or private reverie. She also effectively and creatively uses metal screening to construct images that become shadowy figures or dreamy visions, and in Arcadian Dreams, she has obsessively combined these elements to cover each piece with figures, objet d’arts and screens that show a subject’s history, reality, future and potential concurrently.

“I was inspired by a show called Visions of Arcadia,” Taylor-Kearney said. “Part of my intention is ecological: I want to show Nature’s imprint on mankind rather than just mankind’s impact on the environment; but in creating this work from familiar pictures, relived experiences and discarded windows, I have also come to realize that I am reporting on something more personal and something very Arcadian because the Arcadians were inspired by the notion, ‘Et in Arcadia ego’,” Taylor-Kearney said. “It’s the notion that existence in the present—however, idyllic—is an existence in tandem with death and regeneration.”

For Taylor-Kearney, this is a prescient point. A diabetic since a young child, her daily world is layered with instances in which life, death, past, present, future, reality, magic, roads taken and roads untaken all overlap in a seemingly true way.

It is in this same fashion that she has layered her work: there are figures after figures created in paint, paper and screen that exist across dimensions, across time, across realities and throughout environs. Each piece, each moment combines the shadows of its precursors, the potential and brilliance of its present, and its limitless, ethereal future—all with equanimity and without fear.

“For me these paintings are the creation of something new out of the impetus of my past; for the audience, these paintings can be a reconstruction of past events or the meeting of new events, circumstances and experiences in their future,” she says. “As an artist I am a storyteller, and that story is life. Life is a gift, full of potential, and we should never be afraid of our past or what lies in our future, even if the idea seems scary.”

Media

Schedule

from April 19, 2016 to May 14, 2016

Opening Reception on 2016-04-21 from 17:00 to 20:00

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