James

Camilla Taylor’s James:
Drypoint monoprint
10 x 8 inches 

In 2020, the artist Camilla Taylor devoted an exhibit to exploring ambition and identity and what sometimes arises from how one affects the other: deception, intentional and subconscious. The show, Your Words in My Mouth, at the Los Angeles Track 16 Gallery, included portraits of liars and impostors led to deceive not by money or power but by something else, perhaps recognition and attention, or a desire to disconnect from a traumatic past. They cultivated identities that suited them more than the reality they were dealt. 

This “Wall of Literal Liars,” includes James Hogue. When he was 25, Hogue posed a as 16-year-old named Alexi Santana, enrolling in high school in Palo Alto. He quickly became an unprecedented track star and won a scholarship to Princeton. On his Princeton application he wrote that he “trained on his own in the Mojave desert, where he herds cattle for a living (mostly in a canyon called ‘Little Purgatory’),” and on a visit to the campus he “slept indoors for the first time in ten years.”  

Taylor explained that Hogue and the others on the “Wall” “(are) all inked in this way like they’re emerging from the ink, like they’re making their own realities with their stories.”