bio
Taylor Baldwin (b. Tucson, AZ 1983) is an artist working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation. He received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. He has been a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Seven Below Arts Initiative.
Baldwin has exhibited individually at Wayfarers Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) Conner Contemporary Gallery (Washington D.C.) , Land of Tomorrow Gallery (Louisville, KY), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA) as well as groups shows at the Queens Museum of Art (Queens, NY), Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art (Tucson, AZ), the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (Norfolk, VA), the Kentucky Museum of Arts and Craft (Louisville, KY) and Zürcher Gallery (Manhatten, NY). He is currently based in Queens, New York and providence, rhode island.
statement
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. In our current world, capitalism has revealed itself to be a fraught ideology at best, and at worst, fundamentally destructive to all life on the planet. Yet its all-encompassing quality leaves us collectively struggling to imagine our way around, through, and beyond it. This is why I believe it is important for artists to help invigorate imagination’s role as a tool for envisioning a world after capitalism. As an artist, I work to contribute to the expansion of our vision of possible collective futures. Specifically, I have dedicated my practice to working with reclaimed material, and championing the politics, poetics, and essential value of reuse. Nearly every component in my work is found, salvaged, reclaimed, restored, or acquired from otherwise outside of the globalized consumer market. My work seeks to give voice to the stories and histories contained within these peripheral, alternative economies.
I interested in a materiality is that cannot be purchased, only discovered, and is intimately tied to the local, grassroots community and material ecology. Once collected and cataloged, the material fragments I use in my practice act as prompts to deeply research the site-specific histories and narratives that produced them, and incorporate these ideas into the fundamental conceptual framework that shapes each piece. Through these methods, the work makes visible how material history intersects with people, labor, class, culture, and the legacy of industrialized capitalism. More often than not, these histories are industrial and extractive in nature, and thus have at their center an act of harm to a body, and to a landscape. Increasingly, my focus in making artwork is in re-orienting the extractive impulse towards reclaiming the things that commerce considers waste, and reforming it to memorialize the individual bodies and spaces that were injured in its production.
At its core, my practice is predicated on materials encountered at the very moment they lose nearly all their original value - and therefore their legibility - within a capitalist context. At the point where legibility is lost, opportunity exists for a radically transformative legibility to be discovered. Working in this way allows me to collaborate and contribute to collective efforts to find systems that exist outside of, even if only temporarily, the seeming totality of consumptive commerce.
exhibition text for “the ground” (work from 2020-2024)
This was a low year. A year spent looking at the ground. A year spent walking, outdoors, alone or with others. Spent looking at the sidewalk, at the things people were throwing away. This was a year spent trying to find the value in the least of what we had, of what we had been taking for granted. This was a year I spent in part by visiting every major cemetery in the 5 boroughs of New York City, where I live. This was a year I also spent digging in the ground at various informal archeological sites across the city; from Dead Horse Bay to municipal construction sites after-hours.
“the ground'“ is a years-long sculptural body of work begun in the summer of 2020 that consists of a large scale sculptural installation exploring grief, public spaces, and reclaiming the value of things we’ve thrown away. Through this project, I have been constructing a funerary monument to late-stage American capitalism using material reclaimed and salvaged from shuttered retail businesses, industry, and the consumer recycling stream, along with imagined portraits and partial figures made from donated medical scans of individuals suffering from manufacturing and industry-related cancers.
This current body of work is based in deep research into the monuments of mourning and memorialization across the American landscape. It is also based in deep research of the history of American industry and resource extraction. It is also an exploration of the production of commercial ‘value’ and the physical and spiritual cost of that ‘value’. The work in this project is made of reclaimed material collected from the street, sidewalks, side-yards, alleys, and other interstitial public spaces of the cities of the American northeast during the coronavirus pandemic. Because of this shared origin, the conditions of the physical, social, and economic landscape of a late-stage capitalist American metropolis inflect the material, and thus content of the work; loss, mourning, decay, resourcefulness, and scrapping fragments together in the face of failing systems.
Product-display stands, shelving, and countertops from pandemic-shuttered retail businesses. Copper refrigerant tubing salvaged from discarded AC units and broken refrigerators left under highway overpasses. Stranded wire from broken earbuds and shattered electronics. Tile and masonry fragments from building demolitions. Ceramic shards from 150-year-old municipal dumping sites. 420-million-year-old fossil lime cement from a decommissioned mine that supplied the material for the base of the Statue of Liberty. These irreducible material fragments, their history, and their poetics, are the conceptual and emotional center of this exhibition.
These reclaimed materials are used to compose funerary monuments for the public who have been irreparably harmed by systems of commerce. Imagined portraiture is made using a DIY forensic facial reconstruction technique enacted on anonymized skulls rendered from an online cancer imaging database of CT scans. A pair of legs is cast in a faux terrazzo using reclaimed cement and the contents of boxes left on the curb from when a neighbor passed away. A sarcophagus is made using a discarded mini fridge and cement casts of Styrofoam packing inserts collected from neighborhood recycling, covered in mosaics using tile and 19th ce. ceramic fragments dug up from the incidental archaeological site of a municipal sewage work site. A statue of a priest giving sacrament is made from salvaged refrigerator tubing and a full quarantine years’ worth of chewing gum. The thing held in common by all of the physical elements of the exhibition is that I could only collect them because no one else felt they had any remaining value. This is the liberatory quality we can look for in the material of waste streams. This work proposes that what has been drained of its worth within a capitalist framework now affords the opportunity to be reimagined and reused as something of a radically different order, something that speaks of elegy, care, and remembrance.