The show “One Day All of This Will Be Yours,” featuring 90 works on paper by Allyson Mellberg Taylor and Jeremy Seth Taylor at LABspace in Hillsdale is a graceful world-within-a-troubled-world experience. The exhibition is a loving installation by this husband-wife artist-duo who have been collaborating for over 20 years.
Presented in a series of unmatching upcycled frames that give the entire gallery a particularly warm feel, all the atypical moments to be encountered in this show seem as if they have been plucked from literature, poetry, or personal memoir. “One Day All of This Will Be Yours” invites us inside an intimate Taylor-Taylor story of solitude and self-becoming in the face of decay.
First, the solitude part. In most of the artworks, Allyson takes the lead in fashioning her distinctly fragile female figures set against empty backgrounds—they exist in an aloof dimension, stationary, stoic, and somewhat sorrowful. In a piece entitled The Thing You Pay Attention To (2024), for example, a girl with a dirty blond bob and two sets of sagging eyes stares out blandly as a necklace of fresh grass sprouts around her neck.
On other occasions, these female figures interact coyly with nature in scenes both silly and saccharine, as seen in Slimer (2024), where a crouched female wearing green tights remains still while a monumental snail climbs her back, and Oyster (2024), in which lumpy mushrooms vegetate from the hair of a somber faced girl. Several noticeable themes emerge among these motley portraits of ladies: watering eyes, a ruddy nose, a patch of charming freckles, and a sense of isolation.
Now the self-becoming part, or the ‘it’s-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-I-feel-NOT-fine’ (to invoke R.E.M.) vibe that infuses these artworks with their slightly ominous edge.
Where Allyson’s drawings illustrate a diary of peculiar maladies balanced by moments of frolicking fun, Jeremy’s drawings reveal a sense of struggle and alarm for global realities gone wrong balanced by displays of tender remediation and connectivity with Mother Earth. With Hoda (2024), for example, we encounter the slender body of a deer with a human hand as the head—the hand reaches out and upward as if to say, ‘stop there!’—suggesting hope that humanity maintains a conscious perspective of (and for) the animal kingdom. In another work titled UGH (2024), a beaver head appears caught and confused within a stray red whirlwind of a line, provoking a heartfelt wince.
The seamless Taylor/Taylor style affirms the creative magic between them—she draws the human figures, he tends to draw the animals, sometimes within one drawing, other times as separate drawings—and the result is always amusing and offbeat. St. Francis: Make Gardens Not War (2024) is a sweet example of their collaboration, and we discern the character covered in flowing seaweed as Allyson’s and the jumping bunny in the left of the figure as Jeremy’s.
Both artists manifest “floating world” scenes, where humanness and animality are suspended in a muted state without horizon. The color palette for these works is particularly enchanting, and what a joy to learn that the Taylor team make their own organic pigments and watercolors from their garden homestead in Virginia.
This lively series of Taylor/Taylor visualization-drawings disclose their combined fascination with the fraught relationship between humans (and themselves) and nature (and capitalist culture). The show expresses sensitivity and humility and a flippant flipside all the same. For a moment we can forget a planet mired in waste due to relentless over-consumption, and we can enjoy the innocence (and ominous realism) of girls and bunnies and mushrooms cavorting within slightly sci-fi fantasy-land combinations.
“One Day All of This Will Be Yours” suggests that the paradox of “the-world-as-we-know-it” is both an uncomfortable dystopian reality offset by spaces of imaginative play.
