Lead time
Our 2021 Lead Time participant was Sarah May Taylor, mentored by Eve Tagny and Elizabeth M. Webb from February 15 through March 26, 2021. We were pleased to support Taylor, whose work investigates female roles and relations, the body, and memory as they intersect with notions of race, class, belonging, and identity. She uses a variety of mediums: sculpture, photography, collage, and painting to question the ways in which personal narratives can serve as a form of resistance to structures of oppression. For Taylor, storytelling functions as a methodology for healing and human connection.
Lead Time is intended to offer artists financial and pedagogical support without asking for specified outcomes. This program is a process of artmaking and thinking; not predetermined outcomes. We envision it as generative and open, taking a process-driven approach and building long-term working relationships between artists. Lead Time is a framework that is live, adaptable, and research-based, with the intention of activating a latent period for the AGYU while our doors are closed to the public, supporting and privileging the moments between the initiation of an idea and its resolution.
Biographies:
Sarah May Taylor is a Toronto-based mixed-media artist, originally from Hamilton, Ontario. She has participated in engagements such as the Nomadic Residency (2019) hosted by artist Tania Bruguera, the Rural Reading Riot Festival (2020) at the Durham Art Gallery, and the Fe *Mail* Art exhibition (2019) at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn. Taylor received her BFA in Sculpture/Installation from OCAD University.
Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice focuses on the correlations between the bereavement process and nature’s rhythms, cycles, forms, and materials that serve as the ultimate guides for renewal. Navigating between writing, photography, video, and installation, her work explores the various pathways of resiliency adopted by culturally hybrid communities in order to free themselves of colonial and patriarchal heritages and envision sustainable futurities. She holds a BFA in Film production/documentary from Concordia University and a certificate in Journalism from the University of Montreal. Her work has been exhibited in Montreal, Lévis, Toronto, Berlin, and New York. She is the recipient of the Mfon grant (2018), the Plein Sud Bursary (2020), and has been shortlisted for the CAP Prize (2018), the Burtynsky Photobook Grant (2018), and the OAAG Award (2020).
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the US, UK, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She was Fall 2019 Visiting Faculty in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Image: Sarah May Taylor, Shadow in Red, 2018. Courtesy the artist.
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