Melisa Taylor

The natural world is the blue-print for my work while allusions to past and contemporary culture inform its developmental stages. I develop an aesthetic of duality through the hybridization of divergent approches to art. In the studio, I get involved in a labour-intensive  practice where multiple techniques are used in conjunction, notably; impasto texturing, collage of found objects, stain washes, powder dusting, torching, spray painting and stencilling. Preponderately, I rely on commercial tools for the making of my paintings and allow for these instruments to dictate the course of my work, typically human scale. In the tradition of Process art, I seek the presence of external variables such as natural physical properties, weight or wind for instance, to inject unpredictability in my art-making. As I stand witnessing the unexpected organic processes is the idea of embracing chance and intervening with appropriate timing. In an interplay of intuition, pastiche and arbitrariness, I attempt to negotiate the multiple modes out of which I work from.

Recently, I have explored the assimilation of aerosol painting, pyrography and sanding techniques on wood while engaging my work with the legacy of various painters. A synthesis of these interests is materializing in Turbulences.  This ethereal series solicits our visual perception by suggesting a discoverable lattice of motifs emerging out of defacement and obscuration, where allusions to natural phenomena act as allegories for the human experience. My latest and ongoing body of work -titled L' Iris et l'Abreuvoir | In City and in Forest- follows the path initiated with Turbulences but is evolving over different preoccupations.

The plural nature of life provides a complex flux out of which each new body of work emerges and I opt to create empirically a formal language evocative of the notions of heritage, longing and identity, as cyclical and ambiguous entities.

My work has been shown and acquired in private collections across Canada, the United States, Australia, Europe and Asia.

EXCLUSIVE ARTWORK BY MELISA TAYLOR