digital & abstracted nudes
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May
- June, 2000
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Gallery Bershad presents its first exhibition dedicated to digital media. Bill Hayward and Maggie Taylor are distinctly innovative artists who explore the compelling depths of digital artistry. While our quotidian experience has become inundated with digitally manipulated images, their works demand that viewers pause to imbibe and carefully consider constructed reality.
About the artists...
Bill
Hayward has been featured in international solo exhibitions since
1979. He is currently at work with Rizzoli publishers on his second book of
photography and a video documentary of its production, both due in December
2000. Hayward has works in the collections of: The Portland Museum Of Art,
The Ernst Haas Memorial, Chase Manhattan Bank, and many international venues.
Hayward's extensive background in photography and painting drew him to digital media as a means to visually merge his interests. The images exhibited at Gallery Bershad are culled from two series: the mixed-media self portraits and The Quality of Objects: The American Way of Memory.
The self portrait figures embody disconnection between the male physical body and internal psychology. By partially masking the photographs with paint, Hayward occludes their three dimensionality and physical depth. Hayward suggests they are "an attempt to find more words for the body, to speak more honestly about the body."
Juxtaposed with these explorations of the body, The Quality of Objects images visually explore environments through assiduously crafted objects. In the Voyager series, Hayward creates three inch rafts and boats that hold tiny anonymous figures. He then photographs the scenes and scans them for further development. Hayward uses the digital medium to manipulate the images, thereby creating scenes that speak to the isolation rampant in our commodified age.
Maggie Taylor has exhibited in solo shows across the country, as well as the New York City MTA billboards in Grand Central Station. This is Maggie Taylor's debut Boston exhibition.
Digital imaging was a natural evolution from Taylor's lifelong passion for photography. The people, objects, and animals who populate her elegantly playful scenarios are imbued with dynamic presence and a sense of three-dimensional animation. The scenes suggest a narrative, but open more ideas than they resolve by intermingling factual memory with dreams. Working spontaneously and intuitively, Taylor abstracts ideas from the objects she scans: swaths of fabric to cover a timid doll, feathered dove wings from a friend, chicken eggs, and even a live goldfish for visceral accuracy.
Taylor describes the Iris printing process she employs as a device which applies to the paper, "environmentally sensitive inks …in droplets the size of a human blood cell with complete accuracy." This allows for an enormous range of color and depth, enhancing the altered reality she has created. Taylor was recently featured by PHOTO>Electronic Imaging Magazine for her creative artistry.
gallery2:
Will Sherwood
- Nude Abstractions
guest curated by Michael Butler
Emerging
photographer, Will Sherwood examines the nude body with the eye of
an engineer and the sensuality of an artist. His nudes twist, push, and pull
through rich ebony shadows and luminescent streams of light; bodies become
an exploration of light and form, as their voluptuous contours abstract eroticism.
Gallery Bershad premiers Michael Butler's curatorial eye. During his twelve years in the photography industry, Butler has been on numerous juries for professional photography competitions, and assisted photographers in preparing their work for presentation.
