Name/Title
Occupation no.1Entry/Object ID
2017.05Description
Cloth with buttons painted and pasted over in black paint throughout whole canvas.Artwork Details
Medium
Oil cloth on canvasContext
"In 2001 I moved from London to Chicago accepting the position as Visiting Artist in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I arrived in America two weeks before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. This traumatic event forced me to reevaluate my practice. I made the decision to remove the component that my work had become dependent on, color. Limiting my pallet to black and white allowed me to focus on the formal structure of my work. I was interested in the emotional and graphic weight of black. The circular or oval form became a signifier for the body.
The surface of the Occupation no 1 is heavily collaged with cloth, adhered to the canvas with oil paint. Since relocating to Chicago, fabric has been reexamined and become, tellingly, a source of rebuilding. Deconstructed garments remain, yet now they are reconstructed into larger territories and bodies occupying a central space within the picture plane. In this work, cloth provides human presence without figuration. Clothing is, by nature of its function and social implications, a skin –which imitates the body. By pulling away this skin and ripping it apart, a protective layer is no longer intact. The fragments become an internal construct. I drew directly onto canvas with seams and fragments of clothing; the images grow according to a subconscious organization of these lines. Through this process, the gestured line is slow and methodical, dependent on an innate aesthetic organization. Dry and seemingly charred paint is clotted into and between each fragment, creating a surface that both heals and pulls itself apart. A visual paradox, the viewer becomes witness to the image’s construction while simultaneously recognizing the deconstruction that has occurred to make this possible. The work addresses the contingent nature of structure and the presence of form within the confines of a given space." - Fraser TaylorAcquisition
Accession
2017.05-07Source or Donor
Taylor, FraserAcquisition Method
GiftCredit Line
Gift of Fraser TaylorLexicon
Nomenclature 4.0
Nomenclature Primary Object Term
PaintingNomenclature Class
ArtNomenclature Category
Category 08: Communication ObjectsLOC Thesaurus for Graphic Materials
Terrorism, Clothing & dress