Taylor Davis at The Gallery at Green street - Boston - Brief Article

There's a Victorian parlor trick in which a small sheet of paper is delicately filleted into a strip that can encircle a room. In the hands of Taylor Davis, plywood, intricately sawed and dissected, can be as expansive as that bit of paper. Davis's freestanding abstract floor sculptures (all from 2001) are made of plywood--which he has been using for the past few years--plus pine lumber and, in some cases, strips of mirror. These materials are precision-crafted into odd, even absurd forms. Although they frequently refer to familiar objects like boxes, tables, shelves and studded walls, the sculptures are not really about architecture or furniture. They simply take it as a point of departure or as a way to establish a sense of scale and a relationship with viewers.

Untitled (storage) resembles an upended table with multiple legs. It has the raw, bristling organic energy of a mutant and the tension of a shop project that has gone obsessively awry. Davis has destabilized the table's "top" by scoring and bending the wood so that it curves in on itself like a hunchback. Would-be shelves are too many and too close together to be functional. But despite these defects, the sculpture's cleanly finished, unpainted Scandinavian surfaces lend a hopeful air of efficiency--as if, against all odds, it is trying to be competent and useful.

Balance and illusion are critical to Davis's work. The pieces frequently look ready to topple. Tucked inside are small, subtle surprises such as optical confusion or reflections to infinity proposed by hidden mirror strips. In Untitled (trough), a long narrow box is mirror-lined at the top and appears bottomless from certain angles. In another piece, which resembles a mundane shipping pallet stood on end, mirrors lining inside edges reveal an endlessly reverberating interior.

Davis engenders desire for transformation or disclosure by making the pieces seem about to exchange purposes or reveal hidden architectural interiors. In his work, abstraction reaches back to the potential locked inside fundamental forms, while fully exploiting current penchants for the uncanny.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group