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Taylor Lee
 
 
 

YARD SALE

2022-2023

YARD SALE was curated by Janet Loren Hill and Jonell Logan with support from McColl Center, and installed by Kristen Rowell at SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA 2023. This lowbrow, absurdist performance and art exhibition was activated by hot dog-eating, tire-swinging, guitar-playing, beer-stacking buddies (just to name a few).

 
 
 

Taylor Lee Nicholson’s "YARD SALE," installation at SPRING/BREAK Art Show LA 2023 curated by Janet Loren Hill and Jonell Logan with support from McColl Center. Above images by Samuel Morgan Photography.

PRESS RELEASE

“What can be birthed from the ashes of today’s trash fire of spectacle culture on overdrive? Sweaty reality tv and sticky tabloids, their smutty stories soaked in PBR; this is the body of trash culture, sitting and waiting for the right person to eat from its rotting corpse and shit out a diamond? Taylor Lee Nicholson is that person. A self described “garbage person” or your modern day renaissance human, they meld the trash from their past and present to create true still-life objects—dead from hyper- consumption. Nicholson, a genderqueer multidisciplinary artist, is launching the trash renaissance with their second iteration of YARD SALE meticulously crafted for the SPRING/BREAK Art Show audience. For the “art fair that never quits”, Nicholson flips the script of the typical “fine art booth” by transfiguring the space into a yard sale complete with kitschy signage, over trampled lawn grass and an open-barter system of negotiable prices. Here at YARD SALE, you as the viewer and driver of the spectacle have power over the price. Barter back and forth with Taylor and their surrogates for intricately beaded 90s-00s tabloid covers (the very same they devoured as a child), a bird-bath of discarded ceramic cigarette butts and bedazzled “dad” hats ready to announce your guilty pleasure. Collect chewed paper (translated into bourgeois-ese as papier-mâché) hot dogs, lightly-used guitars and flamboyant flamingo lawn art. Even the paper-mâché wall tiles (made of bloated credit card statements, super sale coupons and debt relief offers Nicholson receives in the mail) can be haggled for. You can rest easy knowing your final purchase contributes to the ultimate deterioration of the space. Nicholson’s sculptures are not all play and mimicry. Instead, at their core is the very real tragedy of their family’s deterioration. Growing up, Nicholson’s Grandma was secretly reenforcing their crumbling home by stuffing the foundation with newspapers and tabloids to absorb the rising water in the basement. In Nicholson’s own words, “she was keeping our white trash family afloat on a mound of molded paper pulp, slimy pink with mildew and smeared with Priscilla Presley”. Channeling their queer icons, John Waters and James Whale, Nicholson saturates their work in humor and camp as a lubrication for the bleaker realities of growing up in poverty. A poltergeist they conjure through the severed heads and half bodies that lie about the lawn. Their own take on, Luncheon In The Grass, but where this one shows the resulting self-destruction of survival tactics learned when being “raised on garbage.”

Ultimately, Yard Sale is completed by its site within SPRING/BREAK Art Show, a successful art fair and locus of class clash. Viewers can choose to peruse Nicholson’s nostalgia naked for all on the lawn, contribute to the noise of poverty by drawing on the “sidewalk tiles” at the entrance of the yard and/or barter for “garbage” and help support the trash renaissance. Like Oldenburg’s, Store, Adrian Piper’s, The Probable Trust Registry, and Andrea Fraser’s, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, Nicholson’s, YARD SALE, tethers the viewer to the work, tugging and tying that umbilical cord into knots of complicity that the humor of the pieces may have initially masked. They ask, “How much are you willing to pay, today?””
— Janet Loren Hill, Curator
 
 
 
 
 

THE team

 

Install

Kristen Rowell and Taylor Lee Nicholson installed the work over the course of 3 days. Kristen was absolutely instrumental in the overall YARD SALE experience, from designing the custom lighting rigs, building a rack for the ceramic dad hats, and considering every detail of the installation down to the last screw. YARD SALE would not have happened without Kristen!

McColl Center

YARD SALE was a McColl Center team effort, co-curated by McColl Center Vice President + Creative Director Jonell Logan and Artist-in-Residence Alumna Janet Loren Hill. “Participating in SPRING/BREAK Art Show has been a goal of Taylor’s for years. We are honored to support them in this much anticipated moment, and we are also thrilled to bring the McColl Center creative community to Los Angeles for this much-loved event in the contemporary art world,”
said Logan.

Single/Palm Trophy

Janet and Jonell ended up winning the Single/Palm award for Best Curation - a new trophy being awarded for the first time! The award was designed Carlton DeWoody (@carltondewoody) and decided-upon secretly throughout the week by a panel of judges!

 

featured in

 
 

people and pups activating yard sale!

 
 

A HUGE THANKS

 

A huge thanks to the following artists who helped work on the original iteration of YARD SALE: Danielle Arias, Megan Danuck, Kitty Jardenil, Doris Kapner, Danica Pantic, Alexis Robertson, Kristen Rowell, Dennis Thomas. AND A HUGE shout out to everyone who came through!!