Taylor McKimens’ paintings and installations blur the line between drawing and sculpture, taking a graphic sensibility and expanding it into clever and subtle environments. Deadbeats and derelicts roam sparse, harshly-lit worlds of soggy bread and Band-Aids, bologna and knotted garden hose. The palette is a dulled fixins’s bar of mustardy yellows, graying tomatoes, and limpid greens—pastels have never looked quite so sinister. Taylor has this predilection for the entropic—splatters, drips, tangles, messes and decay, rust and ruin—exploring all the corners where disorder begins to reclaim our fabricated environment and our bodies. No one is smiling and everyone is somehow sweaty. Strong comic book influences and a childhood in a small desert border town in California lend an edge to the tragico-comic energy of his pieces, and moments of elegant painterliness can invest even his ugliest image with a complex beauty. A stand-out solo show at Clementine Gallery (November 2003), entitled “Day Old Bread” introduced New York to work that had been garnering attention for the past two years at New Image Art in L.A. Taylor was also included in Trunk of Humours, a group exhibition at Deitch Projects curated by Kathy Grayson for which he displayed a phenomenal life-sized broken-down pick-up truck sculpture. -Kathy Grayson from “Live Through This” a book co-edited by Kathy Grayson and Jeffery Deitch