February 17 – March 17, 2024
Counter / Shading represents experiments in conceptual camouflage: In this body of work, recognizable elements from botanical illustration, human anatomy and the figure are detached from their traditional content and reconfigured according to their formal qualities.
At the core of my work lies a heartfelt investigation into refreshed notions of the good and the beautiful. For nearly a century, detached postmodernism has forbidden and trivialized interest in ideas such as the good, the true, the beautiful. However, our post-pandemic world has invited new and inspired investigations by makers, thinkers, and viewers regarding approaches to ‘a greater good.’ More than ever before, audiences crave art that reflects its revived role of making manifest the good—in all its guises—through a new range of possible entry points able to reach an intricately diverse global community.
The lyrical syntheses of figurative allusions within my artwork function as a visual analogue for what I am proposing: a personally manifested, deeply felt invitation to consider life and who we are as human beings in a complex and challenged 2023. For me, the most profound entry point is the human body, that ‘envelope’ rendering us equal: equally fragile, equally resilient.
Artist Bio: Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Taryn Möller Nicoll immigrated to the United States in 2004. She receivedher BFA with Honors from Otis College of Art and Design in 2012, and she completed MFA from Louisiana State University in 2017. Through collaged compositions of abstracted anatomical references, minute botanical details and carefully rendered line work, Taryn’s works contrast the recognizable with the unfamiliar to provoke deliberations on topics such as fragility, adaptation, intimacy and the unknown. Her pieces have been exhibited at museums and galleries such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Johns Hopkins Welch Medical Library, the New Orleans Pharmacy Museum, and the Shaw Center for the Arts in Baton Rouge.
Taryn Möller Nicoll is a 2024 GRO Fellow
www.tarynmoller.com
