“I'm using my environment of NYC, memories, and digital spaces as a visual framework to discuss our present moment and to engage in complex and cumulative world-building. Finding ways to play with the city's dehumanizing concrete grid and interstitial spaces has been a part of my artistic practice since I was a young kid writing graffiti. Now I use my experiences as ingredients to create new scenes and narratives, centered around a variety of topics from personal interests to societal anxieties, in much the same way as Hopper or Delacroix. However, my life experiences have taken place in both the real world and digital simulations, and after countless hours in virtual spaces, I've come to acknowledge that my visual vocabulary has roots in these aesthetics. Back alleys, underground tunnels, trains, rooftops, and virtual realities come together in my recent work to construct an autobiographical space that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Keeping that line blurry, and leaving the edges of the imagined world open, allows me to have a flexible and adaptive visual language that changes to fit different topics.

Though the places I paint may sometimes look like dystopian science fiction, I'm not aiming for that. They're a means of appreciating and engaging with the present moment of the world around me, and to change my relationship with my surroundings. These days though, the world around me often looks dystopian and science fictional, in the sense that there is urban sprawl, civil unrest, hyper-connectivity, anti/authoritarian movements, fantasies of technological advancement, unprecedented class inequality, and an accelerating pace of entropy.”

-Taylor Schultek, 2022