Kiyomi Quinn Taylor: The Total Actor

Curated by Emann Odufu

Ki Smith Gallery presents The Total Actor, a solo exhibition by Kiyomi Quinn Taylor bringing together painting, drawing, textile, collage, moving image, performance, and installation. Taking its title from the idea of the “total actor,” a term with roots in Method acting, the exhibition considers Taylor’s practice through one all-encompassing premise: that the total actor is determined by their ability to perform the “total act.”

What constitutes the total act within the exhibition remains intentionally undefined and mutable. At times it can be Taylor’s uncanny ability to mirror the showmanship of a stage magician through her work, suspending the audience’s disbelief long enough for them to enter and embrace the illusion as reality. In Taylor’s practice, however, the goal is not to make a synthetic reality appear real, but to shed light on the invisible realities beneath the surface of everyday life. Images, materials, histories, identities, and states of being move through Taylor’s practice like particles through an accelerator, colliding, fracturing, and recombining into new configurations. In the process reality itself becomes another material available for transformation.

Across works in the exhibition, ancestors become avatars, feelings alter physical scale, and domestic rituals open onto the marvelous. In other works the more than human world takes center stage within the performance. Inherited faces from archival family photos become an ancestral cast that Taylor calls upon to play new roles within the surreal performance of the total act.

The Total Actor also brings lesser-seen elements of Taylor’s practice into equal view. Stop-motion animation and performance documentation appear alongside drawings, sketches, studies, works in progress, and a new three-dimensional diorama developed from Taylor’s drawings. By allowing these different states of creation to coexist, the exhibition reveals the associative processes through which Taylor’s world continually generates itself. A sketch might become a sculpture, an unrealized idea might migrate into another medium, and fragments of one work might reappear elsewhere. The total act is not simply the finished artwork, but the imagining, testing, performing, making, and remaking that surrounds it.

Throughout The Total Actor, Taylor moves between observer and participant, self and ancestor, agent and vessel. As the viewer becomes submerged in the exhibition, that fluidity extends beyond the artist herself. Their own position within Taylor’s world becomes malleable: what they encounter is no longer only something to observe, but something they find themselves within. If the total act succeeds, even briefly, the audience becomes another actor within the shifting reality Taylor has brought into being.

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (b.1995) is a multimedia artist from New Jersey. Taylor received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2020. Her work examines iconographies of her mixed-race heritage (Black and Japanese), identity, migration, and power. Taylor uses collage and mixed media (painting, drawing, textiles, stop-motion animation and performance) to examine genealogical memory and mixed-race interiority in the language of allegory. Her work leverages magical realism against the sociopolitical turmoils of today as a foil, a mirror, and an escape. She has exhibited in galleries in New York, Boston, Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, and Los Angeles (including, but not limited to Steve Turner Gallery) - and, internationally.

Her work is included in several major domestic and international collections. Taylor's work was included in an exhibition at Christie’s New York showroom and exhibited at the Armory Show with a collective of artists shown by For Freedoms. Taylor is the recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler painting award in 2019 and an artist grant from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts in 2022. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.