| I am a fauxtographer. I love photography, but have no aptitude for apertures. Photocopying, that’s my medium. It’s a kind of crude photography and my favored tool for manipulating appropriated imagery. I use fashion photographs, pulp magazine pages, and art history icons from my graduate studies in ancient Greek art. Becoming Venus and Cycladic Series are a mischievous merging of high art and low culture whose intention is to comment on the seduction of fashion and the way women see themselves. This mixed media series also includes encaustic painting, which combines heated beeswax and pigment. Additionally I often use graphite, beads, painter’s tape, and thread. This is my method for bringing dimension and life to the reconstructed images. My work is an intuitive response to the fashion industry, which is very much a part of my environment in New York City. | 
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Sali Taylor’s art was recently shown at and is represented in New York by Gallerynine5.
Sali Taylor, Jump, Cycladic Series, 2007. Collage and encaustic paint, 12 x 12 inches. Courtesy of Gallerynine5.I am a fauxtographer. I love photography, but have no aptitude for apertures. Photocopying, that’s my medium. It’s a kind of crude photography and my favored tool for manipulating appropriated imagery. I use fashion photographs, pulp magazine pages, and art history icons from my graduate studies in ancient Greek art.
Becoming Venus and Cycladic Series are a mischievous merging of high art and low culture whose intention is to comment on the seduction of fashion and the way women see themselves. This mixed media series also includes encaustic painting, which combines heated beeswax and pigment. Additionally I often use graphite, beads, painter’s tape, and thread. This is my method for bringing dimension and life to the reconstructed images.
My work is an intuitive response to the fashion industry, which is very much a part of my environment in New York City. My studio is in the epicenter of the fashion district in mid-town Manhattan, so I am surrounded by fashion’s values and products and feel compelled to respond to them.
An article in the New York Times led me to create a body of work inspired by a concern for the current U.S. media exportation of female style and consumption. A journalist wrote about U.S. fashion’s impact on women around the world. I was particularly disturbed by the mention of three Brazilian women who had recently starved themselves to death in an effort to become “top models.” Traditionally in Brazilian culture women revere their voluptuous curves.
In a small way, I decided to make a subversive statement. With the Cycladic Series I have infiltrated women’s magazines by inserting copies of my work into the advertising pages and glossy spreads of fashion magazines that promote yet another emaciated model or compliant female. The altered magazines are then placed back on the newsstand or in the pile at the local hair salon or doctor’s waiting room.
Gratification has to come from making the work and imagining the reactions. I never know the consequences of my modest effort to circumvent the perpetuation of pop culture, consumer consumption, unrealistic body types, and the concomitant products and services needed to achieve such a look.
Actually, in some ways my mildly subversive effort has backfired. More and more I find myself flipping through pulp pages, getting caught up in the riveting celebrity exposes and articles on how to improve myself and enliven my sex life. I am learning more about Brad and Angelina and making less art. But at least now I know how to get a flat tummy or a tummy tuck, whichever I prefer.
