Soft Serve features a new large portrait, four works on paper, and sculptural interventions by Taylor McKimens in a special exhibit in our storefront gallery. Taylor McKimens makes installation, sculpture, painting, and drawing all from a very elaborated world of his own creation: a world where the dark side of rural living inadvertently concocts elegant moments out of the repulsive and bizarre.

This large portrait features a lip-bitingly awkward woman brandishing a recently caught fish, the slimy pink lure still protruding from its mouth and her, wearing nothing but a dirty white tee-shirt and broken glasses. The four works on paper are part of Taylor’s ongoing relationship with comics and illustration. Working out ideas and burning through a lot of imagery quickly, Taylor makes hand-painted comics and zines (this one for The Ganzfield) that are beautiful objects on their own. These are a continuation of Taylor’s ongoing series “The Drips”.

Taylor McKimens’ monsters are not terribly other-worldly or fantastical but are rather the folks next door, down the street, or on the wrong side of the tracks. Deadbeats and derelicts roam sparse, harshly lit worlds of soggy bread and Band-Aids, bologna and knotted garden hose. Taylor is concerned with the entropic-splatters, drips, tangles, mold and decay, rust and ruin-all the corners where disorder begins to reclaim our fabricated environment and our bodies. No one is smiling and everyone is somehow sweaty.

Taylor McKimens was born in 1976 in Seattle, Washington and raised in Winterhaven, California, a small desert town on the Mexican border. He currently lives and works in Canada. He has recently exhibited at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Galleri Loyal in Stockholm, and Clementine Gallery in New York. His work was included in Panic Room: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Works on Paper Collection in Athens, Greece, 2007.