Sam Taylor-Wood.

Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH January 25 * May 11, 2008

Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX August 2 * October 5, 2008

Whether working in photography or video, U.K.-based artist Sam Taylor-Wood often presents herself as a kind of magician--a nimble illusionist whose craft is cleverly camouflaged as she deftly performs spectacular tricks. In many of her theatrical, large-scale photographs, for instance, she serves as her own model as she appears to execute gravity-defying acrobatic feats.

In one image from 2005, Bram Stoker's Chair, she appears reclining backwards, as if motionless, balancing on one leg atop a chair that is also miraculously tilted yet standing upright on one leg. As with similar works, the image is digitally manipulated to remove any traces of the ropes and other props used to create the scene, leaving viewers to speculate as to how she pulled it off and to marvel at its cool, unsettling beauty.

This is Taylor-Wood's first major U.S. museum exhibition. Curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland's senior curator, Margo Crutchfield, it features 29 works dating from the mid-1990s to the present, including both photographs and videos. The show is as impressive for its range of formats and approaches to image making as it is for its lucid focus on the corporeal process of evoking emotional responses from viewers.

Since coming to prominence in the mid-1990s alongside other Young British Artists, Taylor-Wood's celebrity status has continued to rise, becoming increasingly a subject in her work. This process is most notable in a 2002-04 series titled Crying Men, in which well-known Hollywood actors such as Ed Harris, Forest Whitaker, and Tim Roth are depicted in solitary poses, crying. The notoriety of her subjects as actors only underscores the staged nature of each image, and yet, as with Taylor-Wood's photographs of herself, these works have an undeniable emotional resonance. Like well-executed movies, they encourage viewers to buy into each performance, knowing full well that it is in fact a performance, and also to translate each scenario into some kind of personal experience.

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While Taylor-Wood's still images tend toward the cinematic, her video work often references traditions of painting. A three-and-a-half-minute video from 2001, Still Life, shows a static view of a bowl of fruit gradually rotting and disintegrating through a long sequence of time-lapse photography. Similarly, her 2002 video A Little Death depicts the gradual decay of a dead rabbit, distilled into a period of four minutes. Both videos appear, at any given moment, as both thematic and direct variations on traditional Dutch still lifes. But, in Taylor-Wood's versions, the appearance of visceral reality has replaced cryptic symbolic coding.

Whatever form Taylor-Wood's work takes, its implications expand with time. Like many performers, she makes the process look easy. But more unsettling implications tend to linger.