Icons from chaos

Harriet Taylor at Zero Station

by Jenna Russell

Work by Harriet Taylor at Zero Station, 380 Cottage Road, South Portland, through Sept. 30. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. 767-2788.

"MARTHA'S ON FIRE": egg tempera, gold leaf, ceramic, glass, and wood carving, by Harriet Taylor.

"Flame Boy and Grandma Smoke" is a painting by Harriet Taylor, part of her mixed-media show at Zero Station in South Portland. The

painting is done in egg tempera, a delicate, painterly medium. The title is catchy, cartoonish, irreverent. The paint itself is steeped in Renaissance tradition. And this is just the sort of contrast that Taylor's work thrives on, whether in a guileless self-portrait that hides a secret heart or a formal altarpiece honoring a housewife in a muumuu.

"Flame Boy" mixes the blandly commonplace and the weirdly unexpected to eerie effect. Grandma is a floating, transparent ball of white lines over grass, a maternal ghost whose form encircles a boy in T-shirt and shorts. He sees her and greets her from within a ball of red flame. Around the border, on the black picture frame, precise, chalk-white sketches depict night animals, moon and clouds, Grandma in corporeal form, and a sweet, surreal motto: "Flame Boy/He is Grandma's Little Angel."

Whatever the story here -- guardian angel sent to save budding arsonist? -- the piece has a weird power, fueled by Taylor's subversion of familiar, innocuous forms. "Flame Boy" borrows the visual sensibility of richly illustrated children's books and the paint looks as soft and lush as colored pencil. The decorated border suggests an illustrated nursery rhyme hanging in a baby's room. Tradition is a basic framework, and inside it, something postmodern and vaguely ominous happens.

Taylor favors the altarpiece as a frame for modern musings. This is about as traditional as art gets, taking us back to the church culture of 13th-century Italy. Taylor toys cleverly with the form, and we sense more playful wit than pointed disrespect in "Merv's Triptych," a small altarpiece featuring a yellow cat instead of a Madonna. The cat has a wary, disgruntled look in the center panel. The side panels show human hands reaching in, and a tiny top segment explains his dread, with a painting of a hand flipping a cat upside-down. It works like a thought bubble floating over a comic strip character's head. The story of Merv may not be Biblical drama, but it's a story nonetheless, and its efficient telling in the triptych updates the functionality of a form that's been all but abandoned.

When not aligning herself with art of the ages, Taylor channels David Hockney in paintings like "Harriet and Charlie in the Living Room," with its disconnected figures and sterilized setting, empty bookshelves and shuttered windows. The range of the show is dazzling, and sculpture is closely integrated with painting. Some pieces are small and simple, more symbols than narratives. There are palm-size painted boxes and exquisite wood carvings of hands, polished and flawless. One toffee-colored hand holds a coin and sits in a lit alcove cut into the gallery wall. The shelf is lined with gridded wire and glass beads, a mirror at the rear. It's like a disco-themed, drive-through confessional booth in Las Vegas.

Enclosed spaces, compartments and drawers, are important to Taylor, especially for containing precious objects or secrets. She's interested in relics, the scraps of bone or clothing enshrined as memorials to dead saints in the Catholic tradition. Just as Merv the cat serves as postmodern Madonna, a dead goldfish takes the saint's place in "Shark's Icon." His shrunken body lies on a bed of blue goldfish-bowl pebbles, under a triptych painting that shows his fish spirit ascending to heaven out of his bowl. Irony addicts will enjoy the notion that the nearest things to saints these days are house pets.

A major pair of painted box sculptures, "Male Abdomen" and "Female Abdomen," use fold-out doors to layer meaning and surprises. The front view of "Male Abdomen" shows a man in blue jeans. The doors open to reveal a wooden carving of a nude male mid-section, complete with an apparently moveable male member on a flip-up hinge. It's hilarious in its reduction of complex anatomy to a do-it-yourself mechanism. When the doors are pushed back all the way, flip-side paintings are revealed of coffee and pastry and wrought-iron railings in a cafe. The casual, commonplace context makes the nude seem suddenly shocking, as if we'd seen someone take off his pants in a Coffee By Design.

Another shock awaits in Taylor's "Self Portrait with a Cat's Head." It's a large painting of the artist in front of a semi-industrial landscape, wearing a hooded sweater and holding her palms up before her. There's no cat in sight, but there is a small handle on a built-in door over her chest. When it's pulled open (an irresistible impulse), the appearance of a carved cat's head in the cavity is startling, despite the title's warning.

This is a little like haunted-house trickery. But an odd question survives the cheap thrill -- what does it mean to have a cat's head for a heart? It sounds like an ancient Egyptian legend, and it's terrible, for certain. Taylor purges herself of such terrors by making them literal icons, rendering a sly but solemn structure out of chaos.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.