From long-forgotten floppy disks to portraits celebrating icons of pop culture and history, Taylor Smith‘s art stems from a desire to transform obsolescence into contemporary language. Raised in an environment steeped in Pop Art—her mother witnessed Andy Warhol’s first exhibition in Los Angeles—Smith developed a sensibility that intertwines personal memory, social criticism, and a fascination with cultural myths.
After studying in Germany, where she even contributed to Keith Haring’s mural on the Berlin Wall, her research focused on fragile materials laden with invisible histories: Polaroids, 8mm film, and, above all, floppy disks. Media originally designed to contain now-unreadable data become, in her hands, surfaces of painting, capable of evoking nostalgia, questioning the relationship between technology and consumption, and giving new life to what seemed destined to disappear.
Between homage and criticism, Smith’s practice addresses the major issues of our time: from environmental sustainability to the cult of icons, to the urgency of climate change, as in her works made with melted snow, a poetic and political testimony to the fragility of mountain landscapes.
For her exhibition at Pando Fine Art in Park City, the artist presents new works that expand her visual vocabulary with playful and personal subjects, maintaining the tension between memory and transformation.
You were exposed to art from a young age, including through your mother’s connection to Andy Warhol’s first exhibition. How did that early exposure to Pop Art influence your artistic journey?
From a very young age, Pop Art was not just something I read about in books; it was something that was part of my family’s lived experience. My mother, who was also an artist, was present at Andy Warhol’s very first exhibition in Los Angeles, and that connection gave me an early understanding of art as something bold, provocative, and accessible, rather than confined to an academic pedestal. Warhol’s ability to transform everyday objects and cultural icons into art had a profound effect on me.
We were also a family, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who had striking contemporary art on our walls while the homes of my childhood friends were filled with what I considered safe, traditional works from another era. Our family lived in and with the art and architecture of that moment, immersed in the energy of its artistic movement. That environment taught me that art was not something distant or decorative, but alive, radical, and deeply interwoven with everyday life.
As I grew into my own practice, that influence resurfaced in unexpected ways. In my Luxurious Disaster paintings, for example, I’m very aware of the Pop tradition of elevating consumer imagery and questioning the promises of the “American Dream”.
Similarly, in my floppy disk works, I’m drawing on that same Pop instinct to take an overlooked or obsolete object and give it new cultural resonance. What Warhol and the Pop artists demonstrated was that the things of daily life—whether a soup can, a movie star, or, in my case, a forgotten piece of technology—could hold immense meaning and reflect the spirit of a generation.
That early exposure planted the seed for my fascination with memory, nostalgia, and cultural mythology. It taught me that art could both mirror and critique its time, and that remains central to my work today.