Sam Taylor-Wood

(London, United Kingdom, 1967)

Filmmaker, photographer and visual artist, in her work she reflects on the extremes of human emotion, the vulnerability and fragility of the body and the mortality of the human being. She belonged to the group of artists Young British Artists (YBAs), in her early works she explored female sexuality and refused to reflect women as passive objects of desire. In his video installation Killing Time (1994) he addresses the violent isolation of the individual. Five Revolutionary Seconds (1995) is a photographic series where the camera takes five seconds to travel the 360 degrees necessary to capture the image of the interior of a house and the people who are there. These panoramic photographs generate a series of “scene images.” that distort the original space and open chasms between the characters that inhabit the space. In 1997, Taylor-Johnson won the Most Promising Young Artist award at the Venice Biennale. In some of his pieces there are references to the iconography of Renaissance and Flemish painting, Soliloquy (1998), photographs whose composition consists of a main image, of an isolated figure, and a lower one in which a multitude of captured characters appear. With the same 360 degree scanning technique, images that represent subconscious fantasies. Taylor-Johnson also examines the divide between being and appearance. In Prelude in Air (2006), the artist filmed a musician playing a Bach cello piece, but the instrument was erased. Likewise, in Breach (Girl and Eunuch) (2001), a girl is portrayed sitting on the ground in the midst of overwhelming grief, but the sound of her crying has been removed. It surrounds popular culture and celebrities with incisive proposals that analyze the issue of appearance in today's society. His series Crying Men (2002-2004), in which such iconic actors as Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Fishburne, Benicio Del Toro, Jude Law and Sean Penn, among others, cried in front of his camera, questions the link between the artifice of acting and the release of real emotions. Between 2004 and 2008; Taylor-Johnson made a series of self-portraits where she simulated a levitation effect; in Bram Stoker's Chair (2005) she delves into the idea of female sexuality liberated from the bonds of Victorian society.

MediLab presents his works Still Life (2001), where the static camera captures the decomposition process of the fruit, until it becomes an amorphous gray mass, and A Little Death (2002), where he captures the decomposition process of a dead hare.