5 & 5 with Studios Alum Caleb Taylor
Caleb Taylor is a Kansas City-based artist whose practice freely navigates the disciplines of painting, collage, photography, and sculpture. Taylor was awarded a Studios Inc. Residency in 2024, and has work on display in the group exhibition “Studios Inc | 2025” through May 10th.
Studios Inc. Assistant Gallery Manager Jaede Bayala recently interviewed Taylor as part of our series highlighting Artists-in-Residence and their artistic process.
Q: How do you view your pieces? Is it through an architectural lens viewing them as constructions, or through the perspective of an artist as works of art?
A: I’m always working towards them being all finished works. It’s all an extended exploration of abstraction through an architectural lens, a site-specific lens, and through the history of abstraction across all mediums.
Q: What does your process for art making look like? For instance, is there a singular process that is re-developed depending on what medium you’re working with?
A: I’m trained as a painter and everything you see in my studio is an extension of a thought about painting or the painted space. Even though a fair amount of my practice does not involve paint, the media is specific to the necessity of the inquiry. There are intersecting elements where qualities that are in a painting venture into the collage space, or where the photo collage work is sculptural. Everything is interwoven, there is no exclusivity.
Q: What has been the driving force behind your studio practice as of recently?
A: The majority of my thoughts are about the relationship between abstraction, site, and perception. So many of these works are exploring the way that one would see or interpret an image. They do things that have depth and are active. Still, they have a perceived representation to them but are clearly fictional. There is a fair amount of dichotomies in the work.
Q: What excites you in a site for an artwork?
A: I think about site in macro and micro ways. For example, a site could be a book page or an architectural location. I may be responding to found images, but also a site could be the proportions of a room, and that room could be quite traditional, a white box for instance. But other times it could be the exterior surface of a building. It could be interiors, exteriors, refined, not refined, and so on and so forth. In the past ten years, the practice has evolved based on the idea that the work really begins to take shape in conversation with the venue it's being shown in.
Q: You and Armin Mühsam are planning to collaborate for Studios Inc.’s Group Show. What has it been like to work together?
A: Specifically Armin and I have a long history of collaboration. Site-specific collaborations, wall paintings, and two-person exhibitions. But also the daily collaboration one could have through a discussion. He and I share a fair amount of visual interest and affinities. So for Armin and I to work together it is to think about one's practice as an extension of the other person’s work, but also as a module or unit in a larger consideration of the space. For both of us, it’s a practice in spatial organization and creating new structures through our collaborations.
