Ki Smith Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent work by Kiyomi Quinn Taylor at the gallery’s New York location at 170 Forsyth Street. This is the artist’s second exhibition with the  gallery, opening January 13, 2024.  
 

The exhibition title, Hurry Home, are two words borrowed from a book of poetry gifted by  Taylor’s grandfather to her mother on her wedding day. The poem from which the phrase was  born, auspiciously dated on the yet-to-be-born artist’s birthday, portrays the inexplicable pull of  returning in some way to the place from which you come. For Taylor, home is both the United  States and a place she knows only through family photographs and the stories of her maternal  ancestors: Japan. All roads in Taylor’s worlds lead to one place, home. This place is multifaceted  and ever-layered.  
 

Taylor bridges time through the literal and figurative collaging of family history, folklore,  personal memory, internal narratives, and dreams; both hers and those of her loved ones. By  building worlds in which her references are materialized and interact with one another,  generations are combined into single magical beings within theatrical scenes where memory is  blurred. Or as the artist puts it, “ancestor as avatar.” In the central installation piece Rite of Way,  Taylor casts herself as child in the role of her mother and replaces her grandmother with her  great grandmother in this visualization of a repeated maternal family folklore. Within this  allegorical scene, Taylor collapses time to create a bridge between generations who have never  met; a tool she uses repeatedly throughout her work. The figures appear ready to be moved  through the installation; a reference to Bunraku, Japanese puppet theater. Through invested  studies of her family’s oral histories and photographs, Taylor searches for answers on her  multifaceted and transcendent ancestral history.  
 

In a reimagined memory of Hurricane Sandy, State of Emergency depicts the artist’s father  barbecuing on the back porch with a miniature depiction of the artist hanging from his shirt.  Here she is dressed in clothing pulled from a photograph of a paternal aunt in the 1960s. The  scene takes place in New Jersey, yet the traditionally Japanese-breeded family dog stands in as a  komainu, the Japanese lion-dog statues who guard the gates of shrines; a common motif  throughout her work and a nod to the artist’s Japanese heritage within an archetypal American  setting.  
 

Remains of the Day portrays Taylor’s maternal grandfather sitting with a large Gila lizard and  three hearts in a bird cage, while a hawk sits freely on a branch. Here the grandfather stands in  for the artist, he has shut himself off emotionally by caging his hearts and denying himself the  opportunity to watch the colorful sun setting behind him. The title of the piece is borrowed  from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a story of a butler who denies himself love and interpersonal  relationships his entire life in order to fulfill his duty. Here the viewer can assume that Taylor and her grandfather share a commitment to duty even when pleasure must be sacrificed, again  creating a bridge between two generations who will never meet. 

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- Lucy Beni