Leading a transatlantic life between Los Angeles and the UK casts its influence on the British artist Sam Taylor-Johnson. However, "the feeling of being caught between two worlds comes not from just straddling the globe between two continents," the YBA artist tells AnOther, "but equally the physical self and the ethereal mind."
The large-scale photographs in her new exhibition Wired at Rome's Galleria Lorcan O'Neill embody her emotional balancing through the attempts of physical ones: suspended in Joshua Tree's dry air with construction tools, her body is balanced up high, with full trust in the crane's ability to uplift her. "The duality of thought and physical difference play into the work - to be caught between a place in time, physically and emotionally in a space that reflects my geographical mindscape," she explains.
The tension between kinetic and static energies prevail in Taylor-Johnson's juxtapositions as she perilously hovers above the ample southern California landscape. Among Joshua trees, vintage American cars, cranes, and even balloons, her likeness is occasionally unobtrusive, blended into the rock formations in Wired (Bananas) and almost invisible in front of the muscular truck in Wired (Truck). The medley of raw nature and mundane gears surrounds the photographer - who is her own subject - while weightlessness and pressure coalesce in her release from the ground.
