Stephanie Taylor

Galerie Christian Nagel Berlin is pleased to announce Chop Shop by Stephanie Taylor, which runs from May 5th to JUNE 24TH, 2006. The mixed-media installation, which appears to be about cars and car theft, incorporates sculpture, photography and music; the word "chop shop" refers to a garage where stolen cars are stripped of spare parts. The genre of auto theft is chosen from a rhyme with "vroom" (the sound of a car) rhymes with "Room" (the name of the first venue).

The linguist Saussure (1857-1913) said that there is no inherent connection between the linguistic signifier and its concrete signified object. But of course we justify our discursive choices by their content, and the words, in and of themselves, have no meaning (except for sometimes an onomatopoeic relation). But when the content itself is stripped of meaning, or rather, if its inspiration and justification are completely random, based on nothing more than the sound, then we are left grasping and confused.

In Chop Shop, Taylor expands on this arbitrariness by choosing her subject based only on its acoustic association to its first installation site, and in doing so, removes any 'deep' justification for the piece's reason of being.

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Stephanie Taylor