Sculptor Cordell Taylor is working towards a show he has in May at Agora Gallery in Chelsea, N. Y. “I’ve been showing there for the last couple of years with the “Geo-Met Series” I’ve been working on over the past 10 or so years,” he says.
In an artist statement he explains that sculpture has taken on a new meaning with the recent advancement of technology and materials, but “at the same time the ephemeral does not allow a person to experience, interact and touch an object in the same manner as the 3-Dimensional.” These feelings are lost, he says, in contemporary installations and computer-generated imagery.
The stone, wood and metal sculptures he creates “are investigations of shape, color and texture which define form and space and studies of mass and balance, both visual and implied.… Starting with wood, I create models and then scale up the design into a size and material suitable to the location in which it will be placed.
“Texture, as well as negative space … can also be introduced to create a transparency or an optical illusion that causes some of the forms to disappear and reappear or simply vibrate with energy, giving the illusion of growth.
“My goal is always to enhance the imagination and curiosity of the audience by offering an interesting and captivating visual experience that invites the Viewer to return.”
Every January we check in with Utah artists to see what the new year holds in store for them.
Categories: Daily Bytes | Visual Arts | What's New
Art has achieved high status in the world because it requires the level of effort and achievement Cordell Taylor invokes here. Shortcuts, especially those that substitute industrial production for first-person interaction with materials, don’t take the work to the same place. The mechanically reproduced copy of Michelangelo’s David outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence is visibly inferior to the original it’s supposed to copy perfectly: anyone can see the difference from across the piazza. No photograph can ever displace a good painting. Blogs are not poetry. Machines are not sculpture. What happens when a video is knocked off insincerely or in ignorance isn’t that art becomes more democratic. It becomes less, because meritless goods degrade the perceptions of the audience, and so instead of having, or being prevented from having, art, the people are fed a surfeit of empty spectacles until they forget what art really is or does. It’s a rare pleasure to hear from an artist who knows this, and has the courage to say it.