#maggietaylor

The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University has been participating in the marketing initiative sparked by the National Museum for Women in the Arts, highlighting women artists throughout Women’s History Month 2016.

Other Realities/Divergent Paths: Montages by Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor (Wilson Gallery, Feb 4 - Apr 24) showcases digital collages by artist Maggie Taylor. Taylor received her B.A. degree from Yale University and her M.F.A. degree from the University of Florida. After more than ten years as a still-life photographer, she began to use a computer to create digitally collaged images in 1996. Maggie resides and works in Gainesville, Florida. Her work is featured in publications by Adobe Press, Modernbook Editions, Edizioni Siz, and University Press of Florida. Taylor’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad and are included in public and private collections such as the Art Museum, Princeton University; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Museum of Photography, Seoul, Korea. The 2008 edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland featuring Taylor’s illustrations is on display in the museum's resource room, loaned from the Wyndham Robertson Library on Hollins University’s campus

http://maggietaylor.com/

Tip Toland, 2016 Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence, creates startlingly lifelike ceramic sculptural portraits. Toland explains that her work explores “the inner state of the human condition… the truth of what it is to be human without the veneer.” Toland earned her B.F.A. from the University of Colorado and her M.F.A. from Montana State University. In 2014 she was the recipient of the US Artists Wingate Fellow Grant, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation, and the Artist Trust of Seattle, WA. Her sculptures are in public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the Crocker Art Museum, CA. Toland is a full-time studio artist and a part-time instructor in the Seattle, Washington region. She conducts workshops across the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.

Tip Toland serves as an integrated part of the Hollins community, teaching and creating artwork in her campus studio. Her exhibition is on view Feb 11 - May 1 in the Ballator-Thompson Gallery of the museum.

http://www.tiptoland.com/

Andi Steele, Nancy Dahlstrom, Page Turner, Jan Knipe, Susan Cofer, Nancy Jo Haselbacher... Learn more about past and upcoming exhibitions featuring fantastic women artists at the Wilson Museum at www.hollins.edu/museum. We give you no excuse not to be able to name #5womenartists!

For the final unit and assignment in Digital Imagery, we were required to take a surreal approach in using photoshop, merging photographs together to reflect upon differences we see within our world living in Beijing. In my image, I employed surreal elements from the master photo manipulators Maggie Taylor ( http://www.maggietaylor.com/) and Erik Johansson (http://www.erikjohanssonphoto.com/about/). Johansson merges hundreds of different images together to make it look like it could have been captured in one take. He uses photography as not a way to capture moments, but a way to capture the ideas in his mind.

 Likewise, to create the surreal looking sky, I merged together three different pictures of skies.  Each had a different color scheme, and I blended them together by altering the opacity and blending modes. The dreamlike colors of the sky juxtaposes the subdued blue sky behind it. I also found an image of a clock and blended this into the background along with a candid portrait I took for the Portraits unit. The large scale of the portrait to the miniature scale of the landscape again juxtaposes differences. 

Have you ever just thought about your place in the world? In the universe? I mean really just sat down and thought about how many people inhabit our planet alone...how many organisms we share our environment with...how many cells exist on planet Earth?

If you don't know, the population of Earth exceeds 7 billion. There are something like ten trillion cells in a single human body. As my Chemistry professor said, when you take a shower you are bathing in more water molecules than there are stars in the universe. We are surrounded by miracles. 

Does that make anyone else feel...insignificant?

I was at church this past Sunday for the first time in much too long. The "lesson" of the day was kindness. Learning about kindness in church...original, right?

BUT -  I have to say that this was by far the best understanding of kindness I have come across thus far. 

This was a new church, one that is more than two hours away from my house that I will probably only go to a couple more times. But I will never forget what I learned. I learned how to be a genuinely kind person. A kind person who will act on their kindness. 

It's so easy to be an innocent bystander. To sit by and watch someone else in pain or suffering and say, "Gee, I feel bad for them." But where does that get us? How does it make me a kind person to watch someone who needs help but not give that person help? 

This lesson wasn't just about being kind. It was about being kind like Jesus. Now when we heard this, we all scoffed. No one is kind like Jesus, we all thought. 

But if we all at least tried to be kind like Jesus? Wouldn't you think the world would be a much better place? I certainly think so. 

Suddenly in the middle of service, a song from ten years ago popped into my head. A song from church camp singing about WWJD - What Would Jesus Do? 

All of a sudden I realized that that's me. I'm that person who stands there thinking, "Gee, I feel bad for them. But I (insert myriad of excuses here)"

Back to the whole "we are insignificant in this world" concept. That part is true. Physically, we don't matter - we are matter. But what we can do does matter. The impact we can have does matter. 

That is my challenge to myself this week. To not only understand people's problems but to carry some of their burden on my back. Do I have my own burdens? Of course, everyone does. But mine are so minimal compared to others, I am so blessed compared to others, that I can afford their burden.