Taylor, '22
Each year, ESA’s Visual and Performing Arts Departments give seniors the opportunity to put on professional displays of their work. The Senior Art Exhibition, hosted in the Henton Chapel in Cade in late spring, highlights visual artwork by graduating seniors, including paintings, drawings, ceramics, pottery, glass beadwork, photography, mixed media pieces, and video. A professional artist is invited to serve as juror for the exhibition, and chooses one student whose body of work stands out from the range of talent on display. In 2022, Karen deClouet, local artist and Visual Arts Committee Chair on the board of The Acadiana Center of the Arts, chose to honor Taylor Guillotte with the Senior Art Exhibition Award. In her independent study, Taylor combined intricately-detailed drawings of architectural structures with personal narratives based on historical research and her own connections to her chosen subjects. For the exhibition, she not only showcased her work, but set up her workspace to bring viewers into her process as well.
About Taylor’s work, deClouet says, “Taylor’s installation reveals her studio practice through the display of her architectural drawings, reference books, and the layers of notes and sketches cascading across her drafting table. But what I remember most are the smaller pieces, pinned up as an afterthought, and executed in the familiar compositional formula of social media. Here, Taylor translates a scenario typically captured instantly in pixels to the traditional slow medium of pen and ink. The contrast of the subject matter and medium is a slight mock of her own generation’s pop culture. These pieces are unexpected, satirical and delightful. The installation, in its entirety, demonstrates how the time invested into Taylor’s practice allowed her genuine voice as a young artist to peep out through moments of play.”
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