Sam Taylor-Wood

In highly choreographed photographic and filmic scenes, Sam Taylor-Wood examines emotional isolation, inner realities, and a range of states of being, from self-absorption and anguish to tense confrontation. Her explorations of how emotions are expressed have resulted in works like the panoramic Five Revolutionary Seconds, in which a rotating camera turns nearly 360 degrees in five seconds, recording the motions and gestures of six actors and non-actors, each of whom appears lost in his or her own reality. Questions of emotional reality, of who is acting and who is not, were also raised in her 1994 film Method in Madness, which captured a young man apparently in the throes of a nervous breakdown. In fact, he was a method actor playing a role that seemed painfully real. Centering on the creation of enigmatic situations replete with a latent but explosive energy, drawing freely on a variety of sources from Renaissance painting to Hollywood cinema, Taylor-Wood's use of film, video, and photogrpahy has put her at the forefront of British art for the past decade. This first monograph on Taylor-Wood is published to coincide with a major retrospective of her work at the Hayward Gallery in London, where she is the first artist of her generation to have been given a solo exhibition.