Taylor McLendon – What We Carry / What We Release

This exhibition round includes works provided by Taylor McLendon which will be on view in the North Floor Gallery from June 3 – August 29, 2026.  Lowe Mill A&E invites patrons and art lovers to join us for Open Studio Night, a building-wide experience when our over 150 studios will be open to the public.  The evening also includes receptions for all seven of our gallery spaces. This series gives the public a chance to meet and interact with visiting artists and discuss their work as it is on display and available for purchase. Come out, enjoy a pleasant evening, and maybe you’ll find that special piece of art that speaks to you!  The Open Studio Night reception is Saturday, August 29 from 5-7 pm.

 

About the exhibit:

I am interested in what happens after strength.

My work begins at the moment when control slips, when endurance becomes weight and when myth cracks under the pressure of time, responsibility and consequence. I paint figures we are taught to trust leaders’ legends and constructed symbols of certainty. I render them not as monuments but as bodies under strain carrying historical expectation and the cost of survival in their posture and surface.

Dripping and running paint is not an aesthetic choice alone, it is a refusal of containment. Gravity asserts itself across the canvas reminding us that no figure however revered remains untouched by consequence. The paint moves the way memory moves slowly, unavoidably staining what it passes through.

Recurring symbols appear throughout my work hands in various stages of holding and releasing the Tin Man in states of becoming historical figures weathered by invisible labor. These are not illustrations of power but examinations of its burden. I am drawn to the space between armor and vulnerability where protection becomes isolation and strength demands silence.

Place and absence matter in my practice. Figures rooted in folklore and regional memory exist alongside globally recognized icons not to elevate one above another but to question whose sacrifices are remembered whose stories harden into myth and whose are allowed to fall quietly out of view. History is not neutral, it chooses what to preserve.

I do not seek resolution. My paintings live in tension between holding on and letting go between construction and collapse. I want the viewer to feel the weight of that pause. The moment when release is both terrifying and necessary.

This work is not about reverence. It is about recognition.

We are all carrying something. The question is not whether we endure but what endurance leaves behind.