BIO
Taylor Lee (b. 1991, they/them) is a queer artist, curator, and self-described “garbage person” who loves to mix kitsch and creepiness for comically grotesque results. Their personal story of experiencing the demolition of their childhood home is rooted deeply in the work via Southern gothic undertones. The performance of the self is also a core theme of Taylor’s overall work, and they often experiment in new media and performance art on Instagram - a performance that gets more complicated as the artwork obtains press and Taylor obtains new “personality disorder” diagnoses. Taylor’s projects range across many media and often culminate in autobiographical installations (both online and offline) that are interactive in nature as collaborative relational aesthetics.
Taylor 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 ever 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.
Taylor has exhibited at galleries across the United States, most notably Hashimoto Contemporary, Wassaic Project, Collar Works, Standard Space, Redux Contemporary, and McColl Center. They are exhibiting work with Schlomer Haus and Bad Art Presents later this month. Their works have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Nylon, Boston Art Review, and The Jealous Curator among others. Recently Taylor 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.
Taylor once shipped a painting to a collector’s office, which happened to be at MoMA, so if asked Taylor will tell you that their work has been in the Museum of Modern Art because technically that is true…even if it was only in a staff member’s office in the back for like, a day.
Taylor is currently based in Charlotte, NC, but is looking for the next adventure.
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All inquiries can be made via hello@taylorleenicholson.com.
PHOTO CREDIT: VAN LANE
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.
