EAST HOLLYWOOD
Camilla Taylor
Unkindness
November 8, 2025 - January 10, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8th, 6-9pm
Stray. 2025. Bronze. 5 x 8.75 x 6.75 inches. Edition of 3 plus 1 AP.
In its gallery in East Hollywood, Track 16 presents a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Camilla Taylor. In the exhibition titled Unkindness, Taylor explores both the vacuum of loss and the emergence into a new world and new self – radically unlike the past. Multiple bronze works – representations of the body – suggest an emptiness, a blackout. Cast from hand-sculpted clay and wax, they function as preservations of something made then lost. Stray, a larger than life human mandible, uncannily imbues itself with uncertainty and, separated from its body, threatens like an omen. Stomach, a bronze lidded container, holds inside a scented wax that visitors may sample. Taylor designed the scent to mimic how people have described the smell of scientific clean rooms, where hallucinations are induced by the brain in response to the lack of olfactory stimulus. Adding a waterfall inside a bronze torso, a square bowl with the imprint of a breast, a glass ear, and a roped glass foot amplifies the richly enigmatic vocabulary of the body that has developed.
Taylor began 2025 with a residency at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Oregon. Early morning, January 7, 2025, Taylor packed their car to return home. After more than a dozen hours on the road, their neighborhood came into sight along with a menacing glow behind it. Within moments of arriving home, Taylor, their partner, and four cats were fighting catastrophic winds to flee the approaching wildfire. This collection of bronze, copper, glass, and fabric sculptures was created in the aftermath of the Eaton Fire that destroyed Taylor’s home and studio in Altadena. Working out of borrowed studios, they salvaged, recreated, and conceived anew works for this exhibition, which had been planned since before the devastating fire.
Recent residencies for Taylor had allowed deeper examination of the natural world. During a 2024 residency on Vashon Island in the Pacific Northwest, Taylor sculpted and cast bronze blackberry branches. Sanctuary – the only artwork in the current exhibition that survived and were blackened by the flames – are stacked into a triangular-shaped structure. In pagan witchcraft this is a symbol for fire or water, depending on the triangle’s orientation. Introduced to the Northwest in the 19th century, the thriving Himalayan blackberry is a bane and a bonus. The berries are everywhere to eat, but have effectively crowded out native plants and upset the balance of the ecosystem. That push-pull is reminiscent of fire in California, where, historically, it was a natural cycle for a healthy system. Contemporary suppression protects communities near the forests, but the build-up of fuel creates conditions for overwhelming destruction.
While at the Sitka Artist Residency, they began a piece about the transformative consuming power of destructive rage, Harpy. A breastplate fashioned from etched copper feathers. Simultaneously to making this piece about rage, the deeply affecting experience of rescuing a wild bird, a Pacific loon, whose gentleness is evident in the delicate rendition of the feathers.
Describing themselves as having a “toxic Protestant work ethic,” Taylor spent the year in a string of donated studios forming this exhibition that addresses the emotions of loss, vulnerability, and the inevitability of change. What are we left with when our home, work, and surroundings are destroyed but soft human forms – which Taylor has made hard and frozen as objects. They lay bare the struggles of the human experience – using direct haunting language that questions mortality at the mercy of destructive forces, manmade and natural.
Sanctuary. 2025. Bronze. 9 x 18 x 17 inches.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camilla Taylor is recognized for their monochromatic and intensely introspective works on paper and sculpture, which utilize figurative and architectural forms. Taylor’s artworks reflect the viewer’s internal lives as well as collective issues we experience as a society.
An accomplished artist exhibiting in traditional gallery spaces, they also create installations in intimate and unusual locations, such as site-specific works in a swimming pool, desert garden, and other locations. They are represented by Track 16 in Los Angeles and Kanda & Oliveira in Tokyo.
Raised in Provo, Utah, Taylor attended the University of Utah and received a BFA in 2006, and an MFA from California State University at Long Beach in 2011.
Taylor lives in Los Angeles, CA, with their partner and 4 cats, and teaches at Occidental College and UCLA.
