Maggie Taylor

Maggie Taylor’s prints describe an intimate yet familiar universe and have the texture and delicacy of a watercolor. Working with images collected from antique stores, e-Bay auctions, personal photographs and flea markets she is able to create complex portraits, landscapes and dreamscapes from common and ordinary objects. Her pictures are endowed with a blend of wit, realism and irony designed to make us cringe and smile at the same time.

Using a digital flatbed scanner in place of a traditional camera, Taylor creates her photographs using Adobe’s Photoshop program. The final images, which do not exist on film, are artfully composed and utilize the surreal effects more peculiar to re-photographed collage, when colors are heightened and imagery is combined to create intriguing and enigmatic scenes. 

Her most recent body of work is the illustration of Lewis Carroll’s phantasmagorical story of Alice’s Adventures in wonderland. These extraordinary images, so many years removed from the original text, have a definite post-modern feel and seem liberated from the literal aspects of the story. Alice exists in many shapes and sizes, and many ages, and the creatures of the tale have been newly transformed into a beautifully realized anthromorphic stew.

Maggie was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1961 and received an MFA in photography from the University of Florida in 1987. Her work is in the collections of the Art Museum, Princeton; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; Musee de la Photographie, Belgium; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark, and many other international museums.