into the wood; Alison Elizabeth Taylor plays out postmodern conflicts in a Renaissance art form.

Byline: Leslie Camhi

The master artisan who paneled with sumptuous trompe l'oeil detail the Italian Renaissance aristocrat's study that is now a period room at the Metropolitan Museum could hardly have imagined the uses Alison Elizabeth Taylor would make of his chosen medium. Taylor, whose debut solo show opens this month at James Cohan Gallery in New York's Chelsea, infuses the Old World art of intarsia-the painstaking technique of creating pictures from wood inlays-with postmillennial anxiety. In landscapes fashioned from wood veneers and inspired by her native Southwest, rangy, fetching young women (and occasional male companions) act out survivalist fantasies or stage uncanny confrontations between civilization and nature.

"I grew up in Las Vegas," the 33-year-old artist recounts during a visit to her studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. "Everything there is made of fake material-phony marble, faux wood," she continues. "And I'd always thought of inlay as a craft or hobby. But when I saw the Studiolo at the Met, I realized it was this great visual language that had only been used to honor religious leaders, the state, or the very wealthy. And I thought, I've got some people I want to have play out

their lives in this medium."

Taylor spent her 20s in Los Angeles, where she went to art school and cut her teeth with comics on ...