Taylor Keister
Taylor Keister (b. 1994, Horseheads, NY) is a visual artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her creative practice operates in the complex space between artifice and sincerity, using the aesthetics of domesticity and kitsch to construct layered, evocative assemblage paintings. Through her work, Keister explores themes of nostalgia, hyper-femininity, and the dissonance between outward appearance and inner reality. Her pieces serve as both a direct reflection and a hesitated celebration of her upbringing in a small, conservative suburban town in Upstate New York. At the same time, they critique the cultural and emotional underpinnings of that environment.
Central to her practice are personal experiences such as being raised by a single mother after the abandonment by her father, makeup and self-decoration, and engaging in the performative aspects of girlhood. These themes are often interwoven with references to religious tradition and sometimes unhealthy routines or beliefs. She attended a private Catholic school and served as an altar girl until she left home to pursue a more expansive worldview through travel and higher education.
Keister earned her BFA in Painting from Alfred University in 2017. She then joined the university’s inaugural MFA Painting program located in Düsseldorf, Germany, studying under faculty affiliated with the renowned Kunstakademie, graduating in 2020. Following graduate school, Keister returned briefly to Alfred to teach as an Adjunct Professor for one academic year. In 2021, she participated in an artist residency at Chateaux Orquevaux in France. Shortly thereafter, she relocated to Brooklyn, where she began working as an artist assistant for Nick Doyle (2022–present). Her artwork has been exhibited with Atelier Schloss Jägerhoff in Düsseldorf, New System Exhibitions in Portland, Maine, Spring/Break Art Show in New York, Ruby/Dakota Gallery, Future Fair New York, and TRYST Art Fair in Los Angeles.
Artist Statement
Taylor Keister’s multidisciplinary practice navigates the tangled terrain of domesticity, childhood trauma, the plasticity of hyper-femininity, and falling victim to obsessive trends and unhealthy compulsions. Using a kitschy, commercialized visual language marked by saturated color, gaudy patterns, and repetitive decorative motifs, Keister constructs altar-like assemblage paintings. These works function as both shrine and stage, where ornate frames echo the theatricality and confinement of the narratives they contain.
Each piece is embedded in a world of ritualized masking, emotional excess, and sacrificial ornamentation, exposing the contradictions at the heart of femininity as performance. Keister’s work is at once a rejection and “one-arm hug” of her conservative suburban upbringing. Raised by a single mother and surrounded almost exclusively by women in her early years, she absorbed the unspoken rituals of beauty, maintenance, and silent endurance. Her experience attending a private Catholic school further layered these expectations with religious overtones: modesty, obedience, penance, and the worship of idealized female figures like the Virgin Mary.
The collision of beauty rituals and religious discipline created a surreal foundation of both control and collapse—polished on the outside, fraying on the inside. Her figures are often frozen in moments of hysteria or composure, trying to remove their skins, and exaggerated to absurdity. They submit willingly to Stepford-like roles while simultaneously undermining them. The tension between softness and rigidity, sincerity and artifice, emerges through material and subject alike. These characters and settings oscillate between being pitiable and powerful, plastic and sacred. Keister’s work satirizes the monotony and emotional labor of looking "put together," while also confessing an uneasy comfort in those very rituals. In doing so, she challenges traditional ideals of womanhood by exposing their cracks, forcing us to consider the psychological cost of perfection and the blurred boundaries between devotion and delusion.
www.taylorkeister.com
