The Fondation des États-Unis (FEU) is pleased to present the exhibition How to Capture Flow by Taylor Smith, former resident and Harriet Hale Woolley scholar (2017-2018), which will open on Wednesday, January 9 as part of Art-Hop-Polis (7-8.30pm). The exhibition will run from January 10 to 31.
The exhibition How to Capture Flow presents the most significant completed works, alongside the processes that created them, during Taylor Smith’s three years as an artist-in-residence at the FEU. Including two years as a master’s student in cultural mediation at the École du Louvre followed by a year as a Harriet Hale Woolley Scholar, Taylor’s three-year residency at the FEU has been a privileged and prolific period both material and conceptual development of her work. The title of the exhibition, How to Capture Flow, therefore describes the never-ending pursuit of a sense of both visual and conceptual flow that Taylor investigates through her research and creations, spreading across the disciplines of painting, alternative photography techniques (cyanotype, anthotype, chlorophyll print, gum bichromate…), printmaking (photogravure, offset lithography, monotype…), and collage of natural collected and synthetic materials. After her last solo exhibition at the FEU entitled Symbiosis, Taylor has since refined her research to study a more specific type of flow: that of morphogenesis. Based on its origins in embryology (Wilhelm Roux, 1894), morphogenesis is defined as the biological process that causes an organism to develop its shape through cell differentiation, according to a pre-existing genetic blueprint. However, the term is used much more loosely across a variety of disciplines today: Beginning with its Greek origins as simply “beginning of the shape”, it is understood within the context of Taylor’s artistic production as the development of forms and structures in both nature and the increasingly synthetic human world, including everything from neuronal development, fractal geometry in tree growth, and even geomorphological processes of landscape formation (erosion, tectogenesis…), that are increasingly impacted by humans, such as the formation of relief patterns of Earth’s mountain ranges and coastlines. By collecting, superposing and juxtaposing, printing, then manipulating the traces of these morphogenetic processes (from the patterns of collected tropical leaves and shells to microscopic imagery of neurons and minerals), thanks to collaborations with scientists from the Institut de Biologie de l’École Normale Supérieure, the Jardin des Plantes, and aerial environmentalist photographer J Henry Fair, Taylor questions and reframes her own relationship as a human and artist to these morphogenetic processes. By extension, she investigates the perpetual conflict between nature and cultural production, ultimately addressing humans’ insatiable desire to “perfect” both their surrounding and internal, biological environments.
About the Artist
Taylor Smith (b. 1993, Rochester, New York) received a B.F.A. in Painting and a B.A. in Art History from Boston University in 2015, before completing an M.A. in Cultural Mediation at the École du Louvre in Paris in 2017. She was then awarded the Harriet Hale Woolley Scholarship by the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris (2017-2018). Taylor has participated in several group and solo exhibitions, primarily in Paris and in Boston, in addition to a mural project and residency at the Asociación Atlas for eco-tourism in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. Via her manipulation of natural and artificial morphogenetic processes and both organic and man-made materials, she investigates the perpetual conflict between nature and cultural production, addressing humans’ insatiable desire to “perfect” their surrounding environment.
Opening Hours
Monday to Friday from 10am to 12:30pm and 2:30pm to 6pm. Evenings or weekends by appointment only: communication@feusa.org
The vernissage will take place on Wednesday, January 9th from 7-8:30pm as part of Art-Hop-Polis, art hopping at the Cité internationale. The detailed program will be published on CitéScope after the December edition.