Taralee Guild

Taralee Guild was born in 1984 in Thunder Bay, Ontario. At twelve she inherited her Grandma Ethel’s paint box and easel and began painting — an impromptu still life session that turned into a lifelong practice. She moved west and graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design with a BFA in Visual Arts in 2010, bringing to her self-taught passion a grounding in art history and critical theory.

She works full time from her studio in Vancouver. Her work has been collected internationally, in private and public collections. She works on several series simultaneously, each with its own ideological context.

The two series for which she is best known are formally opposite and philosophically connected. The Airstreams paintings are hyper-realist studies of mid-century aluminum trailers — Spartanettes, Airstreams, Westfalias — painted from photographs she takes at vintage trailer rallies, traveling as far as Pismo Beach, California to find the right subjects. The appeal is not nostalgia.

She reads the reflective metal through Bataillean Surrealism: the aluminum skin becomes an arena for animal mimicry, doubled imagery, and formlessness — the trailer hides in its surroundings the way camouflage hides an animal, and the distorted reflection is simultaneously a precise record of the surrounding landscape and something hallucinatory and unrecognizable. Because she photographs the trailers herself, each reflection is technically a self-portrait, though the figure that appears is faceless, elongated, and operating from a disembodied vantage point. The Nature’s Cathedral series is the other pole.