Mark Taylor

Visual artist Mark Taylor uses a 1960’s New Home sewing machine as a collage tool, creating unusual landscapes that combine found images culled from multiple sources  (glossy magazines, textbooks, travel postcards, old snapshots) with blocks of painted and screen-printed color. These sutured mountains, valleys, rivers, oceans, and clouds  form “ziptychs,” diptychs joined using zippers. The title of the show comes from Taylor’s propensity to mount small pieces onto the covers of old books, which take on new life as colorful backgrounds for his playful creations. 

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Taylor’s interest in landscapes grew out of a previous body of work inspired by the landscapes found on 1950’s era pulp science fiction paperbacks, which he made into a series of four-color screen prints and a limited edition artist book. The artist’s reuse and recycle process is just another expression of his concentration on and concern for our rapidly changing environment. 

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Mark Taylor has been an artist for most of his adult life, starting out as an experimental filmmaker in 1980’s San Francisco, where he currently maintains a studio and a freelance writing practice, and also teaches Media Studies at the University of San Francisco.

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Taylor spends the rest of his time in his Mokelumne Hill studio, making physical artworks that range across media — from collage to bookmaking to screen printing. He founded Imaginary Lamp Empire, a business producing one-of-a-kind, handmade lamps with ceramic artist James Aarons in 2015. The lamps fit in nicely with Taylor's visual art, which has found its way into the artist book collections at many U.S. institutions, including: the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; Stanford University; the University of Southern California; the Palace of the Legion of Honor; the Rhode Island School of Design; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; and the New York Museum of Modern Art, among others.