Collagist Joy Taylor has many, many shoe boxes of materials awaiting their true purposes. The once-avid collector of sponges, toothbrushes, matches, sycamore leaves, and “fabulous, frightening doctor’s tools” now finds that extraordinary efforts to collect are no longer needed—objects simply suggest themselves to her. The androgynous face, shared by all Taylor’s pieces in the Skin Deep series, is actually a doctor’s-office schematic, a sticker employed to chart the progress of a worrisome growth or lesion on a patient’s face. Similar diagrams exist for all body parts, but Taylor points out that she lifted the face stickers in particular because “it is such a stylized drawing, rather Egyptian in style, where both profiles of the face, including both ears, are included along with the full frontal view—a view impossible to gain in nature—but useful to a dermatologist because one sticker can show all, and useful to me for its unique quality of line, impossible point of view, the rather philosophical expression, and the gender-questionable nature of him/her.” Taylor’s collages are not random pastiches but calculated permutations. By resituating the face among other found materials and hoarded treasures, she engages the observer in an optical game of re-evaluation and re-cognition. Pieces from Skin Deep will be exhibited in a group show through October 12 at BCB Art, 116 Warren Street, Hudson. (518) 828-4539; www.bcbart.com.
