TARYN McMAHON

Taryn McMahon received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is an Assistant Professor at Kent State University. McMahon blends digital and hand drawn processes to explore how interactions with the natural world are mediated through technology, and are thus fragmented and selective. Her work has received numerous awards including a Puffin Foundation Grant and Denbo Fellowship at Pyramid Atlantic. She has exhibited extensively, including at The Print Center, Philadelphia, and the International Print Center, NYC.

“Human impact on ecologies and cultural preconceptions of nature have been the primary concerns of my artwork for nearly ten years. My recent artworks explore dislocated and hyperreal landscapes that conflate reality with simulation, such as botanical gardens. I am particularly interested in the ways that art - from landscape painting to botanical engravings - has fueled and shaped fantasies of nature that pose it as something "other."

The spaces I draw and photograph reveal complex interactions between the human and non-human. The drawings and photographs are manipulated and filtered through digital and handmade printmaking processes to generate mixed media works on paper and installations. As viewers walk around the installations, they shift from pictorial image to sculptural object; their constructed-ness is revealed. My works in both installation and two-dimension move between real and artificial, landscape and construction.”