UP AND AWAY

An escalator is designed to take us somewhere. Here, the destination has disappeared, leaving only the promise of ascent.

Elina Tailor turns that familiar upward movement into something more uneasy. The escalator rises through a field of gold, clean and uninterrupted, with nothing to tell us where it ends. At first, the image feels optimistic. To rise is to advance. To go higher is to have succeeded.

But Tailor is less interested in arrival than in what happens to us along the way.

She writes, “The strange thing about moving upward long enough is that eventually nobody asks where the ride began in the first place. Maybe that’s why some people stop caring about what gets left behind, as long as there is still enough left to keep the ride going.”

The escalator begins to look less like a path toward success and more like a machine that depends on our willingness to keep moving. The higher we go, the farther the beginning recedes. People, places, circumstances, even earlier versions of ourselves can become harder to see from above.

Tailor’s phrase “enough left to keep the ride going” gives the work its darker edge. It suggests that ascent is never innocent. Something sustains it. Labor, money, relationships, resources, memory. Yet none of those things appear in the painting. We see only the polished mechanism and the beautiful upward pull.

This work does not reject ambition, nor does it romanticize where we came from. Instead, it asks what success asks us to forget, and whether we notice the moment forgetting becomes part of the price.

The escalator keeps rising.