America’s most familiar Alice is the silly, cheerful blonde that Walt Disney created in the 1951 classic “Alice in Wonderland.” When you enter into the rabbit hole of Maggie Taylor's creation, you uncover a whole new kind of Alice. The "Almost Alice: New Illustrations of Wonderland by Maggie Taylor" exhibit at the Harn museum offers visitors an Alice that is darker, bizarre, and strangely relatable.
Maggie Taylor’s first experience with Alice, like many of us, was with Disney’s animation. She only read Lewis Carroll's books when she was in college. Still, she had never thought of addressing Carroll’s work until someone mentioned to her how many white rabbits and holes were in her work. She started work on a series of photo-manipulated illustrations, got a publisher interested, and is now showing the illustrations at the Harn and producing them in a book combined with the original story.
She first got interested in collage-style work when she bought a camera and crafted collages on the ground to photograph. When Adobe Photoshop introduced a new version of their program and wanted her husband to create an image on the computer for them, she borrowed both the scanner and the program they had given him. She took her pet fish out of their tank, laid them on the scanner bed, and scanned them into her computer so she could alter them and add them to a book cover. The fish recovered from the experience, but Taylor was to repeat the process with various other objects: resin animals, dead animals, watches, and alligators. She still collects drawers full of readily-available materials exclusively for photo manipulation. When one of the people in her photographs isn’t positioned to her liking, she uses parts of photos of herself and her husband.
Her husband, Jerry Uelsmann, is a huge influence on her work. As a photo manipulator himself, he has a huge library of images that are also readily available to Taylor for her work. Some of their work contains the same parts from images, even. He is also the first audience and critic for anything she has created. The images Taylor makes are a result of weeks or months of labor and 80-100 Photoshop layers.
The exhibit at the Harn displayed these images in two rooms, setting them up in their chronological order within the story of “Alice in Wonderland.” The images are TV-sized and organized in rows and columns, with each title laid out simply in black next to each work, taken directly from Carroll’s original text. They have names like “Down, down, down.” and “It was the BEST butter.” The whimsical nature of the titles sets up the viewer for the whimsical nature of the images. All of the humans have distracted or bland looks on their faces, as if they are hardly aware that they are eating strange cakes, holding Cheshire cats, or not human at all, only part of a lobster. All of the people in the images were photos originally taken from the 1840s to 1860s; around the era that Lewis Carroll lived and worked, when long exposures made smiles improbable. Still, the expressions are so bland as to make the viewer disturbed by their apparent lack of emotion over anything that is going on.
Taylor’s version of Alice is, of course, the most interesting of these figures. She is not even one person in Taylor’s work, but rather several young girls. She is a lonely character in Taylor's story, at once a part and not a part of her surroundings (she is in Wonderland, after all).
For example, in "Call the next witness." Alice is alone, the central character in the foreground, positioned so that she can be judged by both the jury and the viewer of the image themselves. She is colored differently, brighter and more innocent-looking than the dark and moody colors and expressions of the jury animals. Even though the rabbit is pictured next to her, he looks rather sinister and is awash with the same dark colors as the jury. She is always alone in this strange world, belonging and not belonging to it, the only whole human to ever appear in any image from head to foot. She is exposed that way, with no part of her body hidden. She is never pictured with a smile, never pictured being friendly with the animals that inhabit this world, even in group pictures like "But who has won?"
At the same time, Alice is the most relatable character in this series of images. She is pictured as many different girls, which means she could be anyone. Even the viewer could become Taylor’s Alice in their own fanciful imaginings. It is this that makes the “Almost Alice” show a success. The viewer is presented with surreal imagery but given a familiar character that they can relate to. In this lies the true appeal of Taylor’s work.
Although Maggie Taylor herself has said that she was afraid of the reaction she would get to her illustrations of an old classic, she needn't worry. She has been far more successful in her presentation of Alice than the Disney incarnation that many of us find most familiar. While Disney is content to present a lighthearted, shallow version of the tale, Taylor is not. She delves deep into the story and unearths themes that might not even be present in the Carroll telling, finding an original Alice inside herself that is also in all of us.
Recently, I've been getting into the beautiful work of Louise Bourgeois, a 96-year-old sculptor and painter originally from France who was transplanted to America when she married an American art historian. Maman, the image above, is from the Guggenheim Museum Web site located here.
"I have been to hell and back. And let me tell you, it was wonderful."
