Track 16 presents Los Angeles-based artist Camilla Taylor in her solo exhibition, “Dry Tree.” The show, her second solo exhibition at the gallery, runs through February 25.

Presenting a new body of work, the show includes sculptures, prints, and textiles which evoke multilayered conceptual themes stemming from one idea: a tree. Taking the concept of a tree, both “tree of life” and also the genealogical “family tree,” Taylor creates quiet, vulnerable work. A genealogical tree does not necessarily matter in everyday life, but family lineage is quietly present. This theme of a past presence is demonstrated through the materials. Nearly all of the materials for the artworks are salvaged. The past life of the materials, which existed in other places and were touched by other hands, is not apparent, yet there is a sense of haunting, or hiddenness in them. The works additionally reflect on the effects of human activity during the Anthropocene geological time period, a time period that is killing off the fecundity and ecosystems of the Earth; the activity symbolically leaves in its path a dry tree in the dead of winter.

A selection of prints will be on display, including Rivers, an 8” by 10” drypoint intaglio Chine-collé on Rives BFK and Gampi paper. The work shows an open hand, against a ground of black, with palm facing towards the viewer. Creases run through the hand, and also veins, showing what is below the surface of the skin, making the invisible, visible.

Sculptures ranging in size populate the gallery space. The ceramic sculptures continue in the palette of matte black, as with Taylor’s previous work, but at times evolve with surface design and texture. The sculptures now include body parts decorated with floral patterning and fissures. Cracked Head is a large ceramic head with a spider web of cracks emphasizing brokenness and vulnerability. Small, chair sculptures in matte black, Stay I and Stay II, show the artist’s hand in the undulating surface of the work, and beneath the legs of the chair grows a tangle of thick, sturdy roots.

Quilts surround some of the sculptures, displaying botanical and bird imagery in gray-scale, including the quilt Flock, which shows the flattened images of birds in mid flight or reaching down with beaks agape. For Taylor, the quilts imbue the show with a quiet sleepiness, yet sleep does not imply peace. The artist often illustrates the notion that we become comfortable with pain, and then it becomes easy to fall into a half-awake shrouded napping state, perhaps as the Earth crumbles around us.