Artist Statement
Mélisa Taylor is a visual artist based in Quebec city, Canada. She was originally classically trained by reproducing Old Masterpieces in Vancouver. A range of techniques is involved in her labor-intensive practice including thick impasto texture, Lavis pigment dispersion, charcoal and metal powder dusting, sand manipulations and stencilling. The artist uses commercial tools in the making of her work while allowing for these instruments to inspire the direction of her work, typically human size and larger-scaled. In the tradition of Process art, the painter seeks the presence of external variables such as gravity, weight, and wind to inject unpredictability in her art-making. At the core of her work is the notion of "entering" accidents and modulating natural incidences. In an interplay of chance, intuition and conditioning, the artist tries to negotiate the multiplicity of her inspirations.
Melisa Taylor's work is informed by the natural world and modernism while alluding to Matter art and environmental phenomenology. She alternately tackles two distinct work corpus. In her series "Rift Valley, Sondes" and "At Sea Between Fossils and Satellites," found objects of natural origins and man-made are repurposed into an archeologic-like bas-relief. Through multiple layering, each sedimentation is either camouflaged or enhanced in an ongoing palimpsest. Later on, the artist intervenes on those bas-relief Color-fields using Hard-edge geometry, which function as both a disruptive factor and harmonizing agent. In another body of work entitled "Sateens" mainly executed on wood panels, Melisa revisits the formal possibilities when hybridizing chance-derived gestural expressionism with mechanical systems of linear geometry.
The plural nature of life today provides a complex flux out of which her practice emerges. The artist's mandate is to remain free of expectations for clarity of meaning, opting rather to develop empirically a language evocative of the ambiguous and unresolved.
Melisa Taylor's work has been shown and acquired in private and corporate collections across Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia.