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Catharine Clark Gallery

November 22 - January 25, 2009

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248 Utah Street
 San Francisco, CA 94103
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Bomb Landscape Josephine Taylor, Bomb Landscape 5, 2008
Reception Saturday, 22 November, 4–6pm Catharine Clark Gallery announces the upcoming solo exhibitions of new drawings and prints by Josephine Taylor, titled Bomb Landscape, and six video works by Kate Gilmore in the Video Room. An opening reception for the artists is Saturday, November 22, 4 – 6 pm. The exhibition dates are November 22, 2008 – January 24, 2009. A new catalogue with an essay by Timothy Anglin Burgard accompanies the exhibit and is available for sale. Josephine Taylor’s new large scale drawings, titled Bomb Landscape, mark a departure from her past work in approach to color and content. In the past, Taylor used diluted permanent ink in translucent hues and her figures and compositions seemed to float on the white space of the paper. The interactions between the figures, generally her, her father, sister, and occasionally mother, and friends, conveyed inappropriate personal or familial relationships, violation, and power struggle. In her new, monumentally scaled works on paper, Taylor uses large swaths of opaque, black ink to create grounded interior spaces, and the look of her compositions is graphic and less aqueous. The content, while still about power dynamics and relationships, is no longer auto-biographical. Collectively the works in Bomb Landscape are scenes of survival that unfold in a post-apocalyptic environment where ghostly white figures are caught, as if by a flash from a nuclear explosion, in dark, cavernous spaces populated by wild animals. In the imagined spaces, figures wear the captured animals’ pelts for warmth. Living mostly underground, in dens and caves functioning as shelter from the nuclear fallout, the survivors rely on instinct to protect the few remaining people on the planet from extinction. Taylor notes the impact of the book Hiroshima (August 31, 1946) by John Hersey on her content for this exhibition. Taylor initially encountered the book--a non-fiction account of the atomic bomb blast on Hiroshima, Japan--while in 4th grade. It had a lasting impact on Taylor’s outlook on long term survival for the planet. Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs,”—a pyramidal model for the psychology behind human needs described in A Theory of Human Motivation (1943)—also furthered Taylor’s understanding of what human needs must be met in order to survive. Josephine Taylor (b. 1977 Phoenix, Arizona) studied religion and East Indian languages at the University of Colorado before earning her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is a recipient of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 2003 SECA Award and in 2004 her work was included in the California Biennial at the Orange Country Museum of Art, followed by inclusion in Bay Area Now IV at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005. Her work is in the permanent collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the FineArtsMuseums of San Francisco. Her work titled Always Best at Everything was part of The Diane and Sandy Besser Collection exhibit in 2007 at thede Young Museum. Taylor lives and works in San Francisco and has shown with Catharine Clark Gallery since 2003. This is her third solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery.