Sam Taylor-Wood. Pent Up

Sam Taylor-Wood’s installation consists of five simultaneous projections, shot on 16mm film, each showing an individual uttering their own private monologue.

Concurrent voices create a warring cacophony of sound within the gallery space. The five characters are projected simultaneously yet are disconnected from one another, all obsessively engaged with their own selves. This conflict reflects many themes in Taylor-Wood’s work: the invasion of the private by the public (and vice versa); the dialect of the individual as full and empty, revelatory and hidden, transparent and opaque; and the crisis of authenticity.

Taylor-Wood had exhibited a number works exploring the tension between mundane experience and powerful states of mind through video, sound and photography. The camera acts as a witness to displays of intense emotion, making her work challenging and unsettling, an art of revelation and concealment, vulnerability and defiance.

Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967. At the age of sixteen, she enrolled in an art school in Hastings and later moved back to London to attend Goldsmiths College, where she graduated in 1990. In 2002, the Hayward Gallery in London held a mini-retrospective of her work. Her work has appeared in Istanbul Biennial (1997), Johannesburg Biennale (1997), ICA Biennial of Independent Film and Video at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1997), Venice Biennale (1997), Carnegie International (1999), and Valencia Biennial (2001). Her film Expanding Pictures (1997) was broadcast on BBC2 in 1997. Also in 1997, she received the Illy Café Prize for Most Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale, and she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1998. She lives and works in London.

Pent-Up toured to the Third Floor Gallery, City Library and Arts Centre, Sunderland from 15 January - 22 February 1997

Sam Taylor-Wood
Pent Up