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ION Magazine
August 10, 2009
Written by Joni McKervey
There is something of the Old World in Montreal artist Heidi Taillefer’s work, a reminiscent and romantic air. So it was no surprise when she disclosed that just the other day, as she was walking through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, she found herself daydreaming about being a member of the Medici family during the birth of the Italian Renaissance. She had wandered its marble halls and imagined rubbing elbows with Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, envisioned taking part in the creation of one of the oldest and most famous art museums in the western world. This seems only fitting coming from an artist who populates her paintings with figures from ancient myth, religion and history. Her classical figurative style of painting and her archetypal, legendary subjects—the medieval Chinese Empress Wu Zeitan, the Marquis de Sade, Salome, Damocles, Aphrodite—couple to convey a practice that is steeped in historical and religious study. The work is nostalgic, aglow with reverence, up to here with the charm of the archaic.
And then it isn’t. The tails to Heidi’s classically styled heads is her preoccupation with technology and the way it is changing the landscape of human existence. Her subjects are chimerical assemblages of human and animal body parts, springs, light bulbs and antiquated clockwork, which seem almost to float with anticipatory tension in their surroundings. The artist herself claims to find technological advancement “exciting,” and asserts that we humans “are on an inevitable course toward a greater merging with technology.” But her paintings communicate the kind of ambivalence that one feels when faced with something that is at once very powerful and very mysterious.
Viewing Heidi’s paintings one feels the magnetizing appeal of the bionic, hybridized and freakish subjects, and there is often a transcendent and magical aspect to her pieces too. But a creepingly fearsome side to her work can also be found: the nauseating fascination of an open wound or a set of conjoined twins. In Power Hive she portrays a ginger tabby-cat-cum-bee-hive figure whose articulated and armored tail is comprised of eyeballs. Its legs and haunches are made up of antique-looking brass gears, dials and levers, and from its chest two ridged, tongue-shaped tentacles protrude like the feelers of a blind mollusk. Parts of the creature’s body are wrapped in twine, and from the domed hive of its back bees flit to and fro, forming a cosmic particulate swirl in the air above. The image is almost charming, insofar as we recognize the familiar form of the cat, the way that its rear leg is raised to swipe forward at its jaw to relieve that ever present cat-itch. But the eyeballs. And the tentacles. The two dead or dying bees laying in the shadow of the feline machine-hive. The overall effect is disquieting, to say the least. The juxtaposition of solid, metal machinery with vulnerable, fleshy tissue and the porous combs of the hive provides an inside-out vision of the modern relationship between body and technology.
Not all of her work is body-based, however. In The Most Proximate Cause Taillfer re-presents the figure of Damocles, who in Greek Mythology schemed his way to the throne only to discover that always above him a sword hung from the finest of threads, constantly threatening his life at the peak of his power. In Heidi’s arresting graphite composition an agglomeration of saw-blades, gears, swords and beams hangs like the proverbial dark cloud above a cowering naked man, whose grip on a single rope is the only thing between him and total annihilation. Here the artist reminds us that despite our good intentions, our vigorous pursuit of self-improvement and success, the catalyst for tragedy has a hair-trigger and we are living just a knife’s edge from destruction.
When asked to assess the level of moral or political message in her work Heidi speaks in almost mystical terms. There isn’t a message, you see, or at least, there was no original intention of a message; her ideas condense most often from the churning and tempestuous cloud of her own lived experience. Or, as she describes it, an “initial impression is triangulated off of a catalyst (usually a relationship or experience) where frustration or necessary resistance increases intensity and channels feeling into a higher place.” That within the final product, one could read a social, political or moral message is, in the eyes of the artist, just the type of happy coincidence that points to the interwoven and universal nature of human life. In fact, the title of her most recent show “An Uncanny Lineup of Serendipitous Connections,” held this past June at the Joshua Liner Gallery in New York, summarizes neatly Heidi’s views on human nature and destiny. She speaks of a “golden thread,” a unifying principle that exists beyond the ken of individuals caught up in the hurly burly of modern existence. “I have found a way to weave universal principles which are common to everyone into my work,” Heidi says. “The moral or political commentary is [merely] a corollary of my own preoccupations, I think we’re all living out the same version of the same thing to different degrees.”
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