Press Release by the The Mistake Room
Ken Taylor Reynaga’s practice explores the condition of existing in two worlds. Born in Lynwood, Taylor Reynaga was raised in Bakersfield in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Growing up in a community shaped by multiple generations of immigrants allowed him to embrace the histories, cultures, and traditions of two nations. His work is informed by that reality and pushes back against narratives that place stories like his in an in-between that is never American or Mexican enough.
Drawing from art history, popular culture, and his own biography, Taylor Reynaga creates works that are uninterested in the exactness of representation and instead visualize the subjective dimensions of the everyday. Taking familiar genres as a point of departure, Taylor Reynaga re-imagines depictions of natural and built environments, rural life, the home, leisurely activities, matriarchs, and the cowboy hero in ways that are both deeply personal and universal. Scrawny male bodies wearing sports jerseys and cowboy hats are rendered holding roosters on bedsheets adorned with cartoon characters. Red mountains fill compositions traversed by black flowing rivers. Distorted sun-bathing nude cowboys are assembled from thickly layered marks of blue paint forging a monochrome that’s difficult to categorize. Inspired by artistic movements like Nueva Figuración and Nueva Presencia that emerged in Mexico during the postwar period, Taylor Reynaga champions a kind of figuration that draws from both abstraction and representational forms. His informal use of line, color, and materials along with his unconventional palette allow him to show us a world that is patched together—remixed from influences that are American and Mexican at once. In a way, Taylor Reynaga’s practice proposes a kind of critical regionalism that counters the placelessness often tied to discourses about being bicultural. His works speak to both specific circumstances embodied by people and broader stories that connect us with others.
The exhibition brings together over thirty works across painting, sculpture, and installation and is loosely organized around subjects Taylor Reynaga has engaged with over the last decade: landscapes, animals, portraiture, and domestic life. The exhibition comes at a moment when other artistic forms—like Mexican regional music—are being boldly re-imagined by younger generations to better reflect the intersectional nature of their identities. Nodding to artistic movements that have been overlooked, Taylor Reynaga is engaging in a similar exercise and in doing so is expanding how we understand the Latinx experience in the US.