Hysteria

Sam Taylor-Wood rose to prominence in the 1990s for her psychologically sensitive films, photographs, and videos. In many of her works, she presents small moments of human drama that function as portraits of individual personalities, passions, and obsessions. The artist has stated, “I am trying to gather a complete series of human feelings, even if reflected in more than one person. The same room is the setting for eroticism, rage, pensiveness, creativity, repulsion, anxiety, joy, anguish, pleasure. It is as if I wanted to explain the entire range of the emotional or existential world.” The workings of emotion are far from simple, though, and as Taylor-Wood depicts ritualized expressions and intense outbursts in works like Hysteria, she explores the possible disjunctions between outward behavior and an internal sense of self.