John Taylor

Owners Karen Light and Marcus Pina will move Garde Rail Gallery from their home into a retail space in Columbia City in July 2001. Garde Rail Gallery's grand opening will be Friday July 6, 2001, 6 til 9pm.

The first exhibit at the new space will feature ships by John Taylor.

These ships are built from found objects and are based on vessels from the mid-1800's through to WWII. John has been building his ships for the last three years. Incredibly crafted, these pieces look as if they were brought up from the sea. Living near the ocean, John's garage and yard are filled with buckets of junk; nails, computer chips, wire, copper pipe, drift wood, tacks, staples, and more. John's friends often bring him pieces to incorporate into his boats; a broken camera lens may become the bridge of a riverboat.

John has unknowingly been linked to the sea since he was a child. His grandfather worked for a company that sold insurance to merchant marines. And it was after returning home and seeing a photo of his great-grandfather on the deck of a vessel during the Spanish-American war that John was immediately struck by his new obsession.

John will build a vessel from an old photograph. These are not replicas, but more interpretations. A specific aspect of an image will captivate John's imagination and the work will progress from there. John is more interested in a certain feeling he may get from an old, tattered, painting, and will attempt to convey that feeling in his piece.

As nearly all of the vessels are based on actual ships, they become folk objects, capsulizing not only the history of the vessel, but also the history of some of the objects incorporated in the piece. Hospital ships from WW1, great riverboats that used to traffic the Hudson, civil war conversions, the histories are kept alive by these pieces.