Disaster site

French slang for “orgasm” is “le petit mort,” or “the little death.” Sex entails a sudden spasm of life immediately followed by a lull, and it is that lull, the aftermath of a great shock, that concerns painter Katherine Taylor.

A powerful atmosphere of eros hangs over the car crashes and other disasters in Taylor’s solo show at Marcia Wood Gallery. Taylor taps into a morbid, perverse fascination that links artists and writers (and anyone who has ever read true crime or slowed at the scene of a car wreck) as diverse as Weegee, J.G. Ballard and the Swiss police photographer Arnold Odermatt, who specialized in images of car accidents — a kind of European answer to America’s highway safety filmmakers.

Taylor paints the kind of quotidian disasters that spell traffic annoyances for the drivers who encounter them, and singular, devastating trauma for their victims. Rendered in muted tones of brown and gray, the works hesitate on the border between newspaper clipping and mind’s-eye memory.

The paintings’ strange calm captures the serene surreal chasm that is trauma’s aftermath — a sense of having stepped outside the usual reasonable ribbon of time onto some alternate pathway — where the car or bus that previously glided in accordance with the laws of roadways and physics is suddenly belly-up or compacted like a wadded tissue.

The injured bodies are removed, the gawking spectators gone and what remains is the car, as splayed out and vulnerable as a magazine centerfold, its chassis upturned like a cockroach’s belly or locked in an automotive embrace, one car jumping a concrete wall to merge with another, a dangling driver’s door attesting to an unseen physical effect.

In addition to that Bermuda Triangle of spent energy, the works have a kind of disaster afterglow. Taylor enhances the sultriness of the scenes with her hazy, muted perspective. While Odermatt’s procedural photographs capture background detail, the background detail in Taylor’s paintings is sketchy. The bubbled surface of her works on canvas suggest eroded film, but also time’s erosion.

The sellout success of Taylor’s previous solo show at Marcia Wood Gallery, which featured aesthetically but not necessarily intellectually engaging images of casinos, seems to have emboldened the artist to try this new, strangely seductive work, and it is exciting to witness that progress.Afterimage runs through Oct. 30 at Marcia Wood Gallery, 263 Walker St. Tues.-Sat., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. 404-827-0030. www.marciawoodgallery.com.