Mind mapping
Frederick Loomis presents Edward Mathew Taylor, visionary.

By Johnny Ray Huston

Wheel of misfortune: Frederick Loomis, a.k.a. Edward Mathew Taylor, maps out a computer-dominated future in works such as Direct Optical Interface in DIOS (graphite and colored pencil on paper, 2003), which are inspired by the sci-fi canon, electronic music, and astrology.
THE YEAR 3013 is an important one. According to Edward Mathew Taylor, it's when computers will claim control of the world. They will emerge from exile beneath glass surfaces to take Earth by force from their human creators, who have plunged the planet into a seven-century dark age in which corporations – unbridled by any moral responsibility – are the only institutions left. If one has doubts about Taylor's prediction, he's created a series of diagrams that outline what will happen. His intricately detailed 2003 graphite-on-paper drawing, Architectural Template of the DIOS Neurocontroller, is one such work, showcasing the multiple components that are required in order to give computers a soul.

Taylor, or EMT for short, is the creation of Marina-based artist Frederick Loomis. While EMT serves partly to draw attention away from the man who has imagined him, Loomis's story just might be as compelling. Though he had dreams of art school, he spent much of his adult life in the business world, with an ill-fated tenure as a "victim of corporate America" at Apple followed by a lengthier, more fruitful – financially, at least – span at Verizon. Today, at the age of 55, he's embarked on an oft-delayed and -defeated artistic project with missionary zeal, using the figure of EMT to communicate his archetypal works.

"Art is so much about personality, whereas myth takes the personality out in order to capture or communicate an archetype," Loomis – who looks like a modern-day version of the iconic salesmen in a certain Maysles brothers doc – says over coffee at a Fillmore Street café near his apartment. "That connection and identification can be made only if the mythmaker stands aside and lets the process take place." Thus the creation of Taylor, a blank slate of an alter-ego who has authored The Third Covenant, a revelation written in dectets – 10-line, 10-syllable-per-line prophecies – that could be called a sequel of sorts to the Bible. Taylor's visionary mind maps, amazingly intricate mandala-like patterns rendered by hand on paper, will displayed at "Bay Area Now 4."

EMT's obsessive dedication to an undertaking of epic scope calls to mind outsider artists such as Henry Darger and Adolf Wolfli, and California College of the Arts graduate Loomis is more than aware of such connections. "Because I have a college degree, I was automatically disqualified from outsider-art status," he says. That noted, his own story isn't without it's art-world hard knocks, and he does share a kinship with the people he's come across in books such as John M. McGregor's The Discovery of the Art of the Insane. One difference might be his self-awareness about visionary undertakings, partly drawn from his readings of books such as Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay and Ronald K. Siegel's rare, out-of-print Hallucinations. One of the larger pieces in "Bay Area Now 4" presents a cosmology of Taylor's many influences, which range from classic sci-fi sources such as 2001: A Space Odyssey to electronic musician Michael Stearns. Looking at it, it's no surprise to hear Loomis was impressed by the recent Mark Lombardi exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

But whereas Lombardi's frightening maps of corporate and political power were presented along a hallway, Loomis has opted for Taylor's work to be presented in a more enclosed setting he hopes will magnify its impact. One of the most compelling, and in some ways most appealing, aspects of Taylor's mandalas is their personal rendering of technology. "It just so happens that the fiber rings in telecommunications mirror the mandala elements," Loomis notes with a gleam in his eye. "There's a whole logic to each connection in the drawings."