Stephanie Taylor

Using sculpture, photography, and silkscreen prints, Stephanie Taylor constructs a sophisticated—if goofy—installation titled “Danupe,” starring rats, crows, and albino peas. Taylor employs her own arcane system in which sentences or phrases—some derived from the site of the work, e.g., “Dan Hug”—are broken into syllables. She then subjects the syllables to a process of textual play that dictates the materials she uses and the forms they take. In Quay and Ark, 2004, for example, an ark made of bark parks atop a quay (pronounced “key”) shaped like a “P” and covered in dry tea. And in Aerie of a Crow, 2004, painted bars and broken jars are coupled with a recording of a female singing vocable permutations from Taylor’s notations. Sound opaque? It is—at first. But regardless of the systematic complexities in “Danupe,” Taylor’s wordplay is often pleasurably childlike, and her humor becomes transparent. Despite the insistent materiality of the disparate pieces, the installation is as poetic as it is synaesthetic, suggesting affiliation with an unlikely cast including Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, and Christian Bök—the last of whom follows closely from the limit-based poetry experiments of the Oulipo group. Founding Oulipan Raymond Queneau described his coterie as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” In “Danupe” Taylor drops albino peas like breadcrumbs, leading the rats—and the viewer—into delirious labyrinthine play in which getting lost is the plan for escape.