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Christopher Taggart is what you might call a multimedia phenomenologist. His photo, video and 2-D “light sculptures” probe the always-fraught link between what we see and what we know. The material ruptures referenced in the show’s title, Cuts and Splits, aptly describe one vein of the artist’s multi-faceted career: his practice of slicing of paper-based items into thousands of miniscule geometric forms which he reassembles by hand to form fractured images.
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For Marder (In the Supermarket), an engraving of a ram's skull on a red background, the artist drew from two references – the iconic photograph of Paul Simonon destroying his bass guitar as it appears the cover of The Clash’s London Calling album, and the word “marder,” red ram spelled backwards and also the word for the modern-day German tank. The raw, destructive energy of Simonon’s gesture, here heavily obscured by the repetitive path of the engraver, and the reference to martial violence, echo in Taggart’s violation of the pristine aluminum surface.