Recently I spoke with a few Mississippi State University BFA candidates about their thesis exhibits. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting interviews and images.

Upon encountering Taylor Shaw’s jigsaw wooden skulls (31 x 37 inches,$450)  a few things come to mind: poison, danger, hot-rods, Harleys, sex, death, rock and roll and Americana. Then I read Taylor’s statement: ‘The Spectre of Death is a symbol of protection and strength used to represent the C-130 gunship, the plane my father operated,’ he writes. Suddenly those initial references become more complicated, because now they are synonymous with ‘military.’ Taylor’s prototypal image and those embedded within it carry a grander level of contradiction and association: Iraq, Bush, vets seeking PTSD treatment in brown bottles, the Crusades and yes, sex, death, rock and roll and, gulp, Americana.

Taylor’s Spectre of Death series—his BFA thesis project at Mississippi State University—is well crafted and personal enough to be a self-portrait. The icons represent his Irish Catholic heritage, his father’s tours of duty, his friends’ tattoos and his nostalgia for his hometown. What doesn’t seem to register with Taylor: that half of America shares his Irish heritage, that this heritage is traditionally analogous with fighting and drinking, that a cross is replete with ideas of suffering, salvation and fundamentalism, and that juxtaposing a religious or patriotic symbol—the American flag—with an image that could be considered evil or even Satanic is fairly controversial. 

The intensity and archetype present in these pieces are somewhat lost on their creator, which means that even after six years spent bouncing from college to college, Taylor manages to privilege instinct over intellect—also that he was lucky, artistically speaking, to grow up in the midst of two competing American ideals. South Florida has a huge military presence and the largest air force base in the country. But all this hyper-masculinity is tempered by faux-Victorian homes, pristine beaches and the manufactured “new urbanism” of Seaside, where Taylor helps his mom paint aquatic murals on rich people’s walls. South Florida is beer and pistons, but it’s also picturesque and breezy, the quintessential American dream. The irony is that really, the former is the backstage view of the latter. Maybe conceptually, Taylor hasn’t worked all that out yet, but it doesn’t seem to matter. He’s found a material that he handles masterfully and, at least in this series, a subject that rings true.

Here’s the first part of my interview with Taylor. I’ll post the rest tomorrow.

Taylor: I was born in Destin, Flordia. I grew up there. We have the largest military base in the country, Eglin Air Force Base, so there’s like a huge military subculture going on there.

Cheree: What’s a military subculture?

I don’t want to make it sound bad, but it’s like dirty, fights, beer. Man stuff, I guess. A lot of my work is influenced by that. My dad is on his Harley all the time with his vet buddies. Classic cars, working on cars, that kind of thing. Every time he came home, he’d smell like grease.

Sounds like southern California.

I went to LA this summer and Huntington beach and stuff like that…it’s pretty gritty. I had that, and I also had a surfer culture. A lot of my friends surf, not like there’s great surf going on down there, but we make do. So yeah, I grew up around that. A lot of my friends are in the military, their parents are in the military.

Did you live on bases?

My dad was in Special Ops, so he wasn’t the traveling type. His base was right where we were living. And my grandparents actually moved to Destin to retire from Buffalo. I have cousins, their dad is also in the military, so we’re all there.

Is your mom in the military?

No, she’s a painter. She doesn’t do portraits and stuff like that. You know Seaside? She painted a lot of furniture and murals there. All the colors I use are influenced by her because she uses a lot of pastels. She makes furniture and sells it at an antique mall, paints crabs, stuff like that. And she paints signs for seafood restaurants. I painted houses with her for two summers, and we painted a couple of murals in condos. I kind of helped her with the grunt-work.

Did your parents attend college?

My mom has been going to college for the past 1200 years. We have a community college, and she just takes classes for fun. And my dad, he went to [University of ]Troy but I think he kind of failed out and just came down here. He’s a southern boy, my mom’s from Buffalo, New York. I don’t know how they met.

Did you make art as a kid?

I guess I was kind of a late bloomer. Everybody says they did it when they were kids. I did too, but it was weird stuff. Me and my friends would draw these really intricate robots destroying cities and we would make flip books out of post-it notes. We would draw them all day at school and show them to each other at recess.

I took art classes in high school, but I was a slack-ass in high school. I didn’t really get anything from them. I started out in advertising [in college], thinking about making posters and commercials and stuff like that, and then I realized that’s not really what that degree is for. I switched to graphic design when I was going to [University of Central Florida in] Orlando. I hated Orlando. I visited up here [Mississippi State University] because my brother went to school here, and I liked it. So I moved here with the intentions of graphic design, and then I switched to painting.

After taking your core classes at MSU, you didn’t get into the graphic design program. Was painting default?

It kind of was. I was disappointed I didn’t get in, because my portfolio was awesome. But then, once I started painting, I enjoyed it more. To be perfectly honest, I can’t stand being at a computer for very long. I’m really fidgety. It worked out for the best.

Part 2 tomorrow...

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