Katherine Taylor: Moving Horizon
The paintings in “Moving Horizon” range from blurred but recogniz- able images on the one hand, to paintings that for all intents and purpos- es look like brushy, out of focus abstractions on the other. All are unified not only by a very limited color palette, but by the fact that they depict scenes glimpsed through an automobile window, at different speeds. The approach to landscape here is complicated—not only must the details be taken in quickly, but because over a half century the types of landscape that bound highways have settled into a kind of homeostasis—there of- ten is not much to look at on either side of a highway.
This self-similar sparseness of the landscape combines with the fast-glance look necessitated by the speed of passage, allowing Tay- lor to focus on the space, paint and surface without getting bogged down in the tight rendering of detail. The most detailed components of these paintings are those elements that are closest, either the edge of the pavement or a guardrail; these, however, move by so quickly and are so linear that they appear more as abstract geometry than as representation. While elements farther away have more variety, they are blurred by distance and so dissolve into their own, different kind of abstraction. These inversely proportionate relationships between depiction, speed and space are shuffled, subtly folding back and con- tradicting each other. Determining the spatial registers is complex, like determining the space of a Möbius strip seen edgewise.
There is a nice pun that arises from the fact that each of the paint- ings depicts a scene glimpsed through a car window—an interesting update of Alberti’s Renaissance notion of the picture plane as window. This pun is all the better since it is not specifically pointed out any- where, but only emerges after a bit of consideration. Formalist puns and complex space aside, Taylor uses various strategies to assert the paintings as paintings. Seen from afar the paintings have a shimmer- ing softness to them, which pulls the viewer in for a closer, absorp- tive look. Up close, however, each painting has some variety of marks that push the viewer back out, or which interrupt one’s absorption into the painting. For one thing, the final layer of brushwork on each canvas is a fairly even horizontal mark that zips laterally right across the canvas, a materially present X-axis that counterpoints the desire to push back into the Y-axis of the atmospheric picture space. If these are picture planes as windows, the brushwork functions like streaks or smudges on poorly cleaned glass—the desire to look through the surface is frustrated by the qualities of the surface, but the luminosity of the depiction draws the viewer back in, only to be drawn back, and so on. This oscillation makes for a much more dynamic viewing expe- rience than the initially serene first glimpse might suggest, making for a very compelling exhibition that works as both a quiet meditation on space and a complex consideration on frenetic speed.
