Taylor Keister

Biography

Taylor Keister (b. 1994, Horseheads, NY) is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Keister constructs psychologically charged environments informed by the visual language of a haunted suburbia, emphasizing Stepford ideals in which manicured facades, domestic ornament, and devotional objects become vessels for memory, quiet unease, and inherited expectations that sustain the promise of perfection. Drawing from her Catholic school upbringing, her work moves between autobiography and folklore, examining and challenging existential beliefs and personal mythology. Oscillating between sincerity and satire, Keister treats the home as both shrine and stage, a sight where beauty, choreographed repetition, and control begin to unravel. She received a BFA from Alfred University in 2017 and an MFA in Painting from Alfred University’s inaugural Düsseldorf program in 2020. In 2021 she was a resident artist at Chateau Orquevaux in France. Her work has been exhibited at Harper’s, Half Gallery, Marinaro, and Future Fair with Loft Projects, Spring/Break, 1GAP with Heskin Projects, TRYST Art Fair, Atelier Schloss Jägerhof in Düsseldorf, and New Systems Exhibitions in Portland, ME.

Artist Statement: 

Fair-Weather Friend inhabits the uneasy space between who we are and who we have learned to be for others. Keister’s figures exist within a world of heightened femininity, suburban fantasy, domestic ritual, and manufactured ideals, where beauty, politeness, obedience, and belonging become forms of performance. Drawing from the expectations embedded in family, religion, community, beauty culture, and small-town mythology, the work considers the ways a person can become shaped by the versions of themselves that others project onto them.

The characters in these works hover between make-believe and reality, willingly participating in rituals that are at once comforting and confining. Their environments feel familiar but slightly misremembered. Domestic objects become talismans, women become dolls, and ordinary gestures are exaggerated into strange acts of fidelity. The theatricality of these worlds reflects the instability of identity itself. The line between pretending and becoming is not always clear.

Fair-Weather Friend considers the cost of maintaining an acceptable version of oneself. To abandon the expectations placed upon us can mean abandoning relationships, histories, and even parts of ourselves that once felt genuine. To remain inside those expectations can mean slowly abandoning the self beneath them. In either direction, something is lost. The work asks whether we can ever fully separate the person we are from the person we have been taught to be, and whether self-preservation sometimes requires becoming a stranger to our own reflection.

The title operates as both accusation and question. A fair-weather friend may be someone who stays only when conditions are pleasant, but the phrase can also turn inward: What happens when we offer ourselves acceptance only under certain conditions? When does pleasing others become a form of self-abandonment, and when does choosing oneself become its own kind of betrayal? Within these contradictions, Keister’s figures oscillate between sincerity and artifice, comfort and unease, devotion and delusion. Their worlds are beautiful because they are constructed, and unsettling because the construction is not entirely separate from reality.