Rosemary Taylor Best Behavior

Kinescope Gallery, in collaboration with Fillmore Projects, is pleased to present Rosemary Taylor's first solo exhibition, Best Behavior, which runs from September 27th to November 17th, 2019. 

Rosemary Taylor carves out a space for her abstract storytelling and diverse array of materials in this group of built-up, worked on, paintings. Old fishnet stockings, burlap, tarlatan and painting rags find themselves amid fragmentary body parts and heavy-handed marks of oil, acrylic, spray paint, glitter, and ink. As in “Best Behavior” (2019), Taylor is deconstructing notions of what is feminine. We see mouths with toothy smiles and juicy red lips surrounded by fragments of text with suggestions on how a woman “should” comport herself in public. She invites us to look but she dictates the path. The surface becomes the skin, but the message is clear: look but don’t touch.

Taylor’s visual vocabulary embraces free use of color. Pink is used as motif in her work. Historically associated with gentle, submissive and ladylike, these tender qualities are degraded with slick, wet, dripping paint portraying mouths and genitals, in all of their varying shades of pinkness. In Taylor’s hands, aggressive and bold brushstrokes render pink full and grotesque.

By abstracting and disconnecting her female forms, Taylor gives us her distinctly different view of the feminine experience. A thin line exists between attractive and unattractive in her use of pinks and flesh tones of abstracted parts of the female form. By circumnavigating the artifice of established ideas of beauty and femininity, Taylor bridges her experience with strong marks and a renewed feminist sensibility.

Born in Boston in 1981, Rosemary Taylor is a painter living and working in NYC. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College and her BFA at Massachusetts College of Art. Rosemary was awarded the Joan Mitchell MFA Award in 2007 and was a 2017 Bronx Artist in the Marketplace Fellow. She has exhibited extensively, including at: The Bronx Museum of the Arts, CUE Art Foundation, Smack Mellon, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, and WonderRoot Gallery. She has lectured at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture, as well as at Brooklyn College, Tufts University, and the Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning.

The exhibition is viewable from the sidewalk daily, or by appointment, from September 27th through November 17th, 2019. 

 

Kinescope Gallery   616 East 9th Street   NY NY 10009   http://www.kinescope.gallery