BIO
Taylor Lee (b. 1991, they/them) is a queer artist, curator, and self-described “garbage person” who loves to mix kitsch and cringe for comedic results. Their personal experience of Grief is rooted deeply in the work. The performance of the Self is also a core theme, and they often experiment in installation and performance art. Lee’s projects range across many media and often culminate in autobiographical installations (both online and offline) that are interactive as collaborative relational aesthetics.
Lee recently exhibited a body of work entitled YARD SALE at SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA. This solo exhibition was curated by Janet Loren Hill and Jonell Logan, who won the first and only Single/Palm Award for “Best Curation.” The exhibition was also featured in Hyperallergic and Artnet. A visitor of the installation said “it looks like a redneck Pee Wee Herman lives here,” and honestly that’s the goal.
Lee has exhibited at galleries across the United States, most notably Hashimoto Contemporary, Wassaic Project, Collar Works, Standard Space, Redux Contemporary, and McColl Center. Their works have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Nylon, Boston Art Review, and The Jealous Curator among others. Recently, Lee created paper mache heads for Bowen Yang and John Higgins for the new movie Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, streaming now on Peacock.
Lee’s most recent body of work was installed in a U-Haul cargo van. This installation, entitled BORN TO RUN, was both homage to American road trip culture and also a eulogy for Lee’s marriage (which is now over).
Lee is currently based in Charlotte, NC, working primarily out of McColl Center.
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All inquiries can be made via hello@taylorleenicholson.com.
Artist Statement
I was raised on garbage. I ate hot dogs, Vienna sausages, Spam (the garbage parts of the pig). I watched a lot of Jerry Springer and The Price is Right, the spectacle and noise of this programming teaching me at an early age that poverty is loud. I also read a lot of tabloids, trash magazines that speculated who killed JonBenet Ramsey, and revelled in the sordid details of Princess Diana’s bloody death. These magazines had a fetish for things falling apart. And of course the occasional alien abduction or Wolf Boy.
As I was drinking dollar store soda and listening to Barker’s contestants scream out bids on washing machines, our house was sinking into the ground. In secret, my grandmother was stacking heaps of newspaper and tabloids in the basement to absorb as much water as she could to stave off the flood. She was keeping our white trash family afloat on a mound of molded paper pulp, slimy pink with mildew and smeared with Priscilla Presley.
I’m a Garbage Person. I embrace “trash” as both subject and material. I am haunted by decay, a gothic obsession with death and with things falling apart; ghost stories. Like a poltergeist, my practice is restless and hungry. I’m not really exploring supernatural horror, but rather material horror. My work aims to expose the grotesque beneath the veneer. This “bad,” anti-art, like the culture that it critiques and echoes, is bingeable junk food.
