Review of reviews: Art

Sam Taylor-Wood: 1995–2007

Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland

Through May 11

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Sam Taylor-Wood creates up-to-the-minute photography with old-fashioned themes, said Steven Litt in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. For a portrait series called Crying Men, “Taylor-Wood invited famous contemporary male actors to sit for portrait photographers.” Then she asked them to cry on the spot. Ed Harris broke down immediately. Forest Whitaker, Daniel Craig, and Benicio Del Toro took a bit more coaxing. The preoccupation with star power may smack of pop art. But “Taylor-Wood’s work is packed with references to the old masters and early modernists.” The photographs fulfill the traditional role of portraits: coaxing “some very powerful men” to reveal surprising facets of their personalities. Another series that reflects Taylor-Wood’s interest in “depicting psychological states” is Bram Stoker’s Chair. In several photographs, “a beautiful young woman, dressed only in cream-colored panties and a dove-gray tank top, floats in midair, seemingly suspended in a gravity-defying trance.” These mysterious images turn out to be self-portraits: The woman is Taylor-Wood, who photographed herself suspended by wires, then digitally removed the wires.

The high-tech wizardry produced “haunting, balletic images, with her shadows dancing on the wall behind her,” said Zachary Lewis in the Cleveland Scene. Like all the best works in this “profoundly affecting exhibition,” these gravity-defying self-portraits distort reality to suggest a world in which the mundane is constantly on the verge of transformation into the sublime. “Nothing conveys flux more neatly” than Taylor-Woods’ video Still Life, which uses time-lapse photography to show a bowl of nectarines rapidly molding, rotting, and falling apart. The chilling video is meant as a meditation on mortality. But once you’ve seen the fast-forward decomposition, “all those endless, static paintings of fruit will never look the same again.”