Aurel Schmidt wants to keep everyone guessing. She’s a perfectionist and she’s also a mess. She’s a monogamist and she’s a tramp. She’s an outsider, an insider, a nature lover, a trash enthusiast, a badass and a softie. Most importantly, she’s an artist with a singular talent for generating true beauty from elements of pure filth.

Born in rural Kamloops, British Columbia, Schmidt arrived in New York five years ago, after a brief stint in Vancouver. With two solo shows at Deitch Projects already to her credit, the 27-year-old self-taught artist has wasted little time on her path to the forefront of the New York art scene. She’s made her name by challenging societal and art-world taboos, rendering garbage and grime in exquisite detail that recalls, at once, Dutch still-lifes, Dürer’s woodblock prints, medieval tapestries and nightmarish Rorschach inkblot tests. She’ll spend hours drawing lowly pieces of trash, maggots, cigarette butts, pills, flowers and chicken bones, weaving them together into a monstrous visage—the Muppets take acid, then take Manhattan. Or, more simply, she’ll sketch a perfect banana sheathed in a condom and call it “Self Love.”

On the afternoon we’re supposed to meet up, I’m slightly nervous as I slog through the rain to the artist’s East Village abode—the chick has painted with her own menstrual blood, after all. Yet, when I walk in the door of her cozy fifth-floor apartment, she looks adorable and harmless, sporting grey long-john bottoms; a worn-out, oversize T-shirt; and her trademark gigantic black-rimmed glasses. True to form, Schmidt has managed to subvert my image of her before either of us has even managed to speak a word.

You seem very comfortable as a New Yorker. Did you feel like a misfit growing up in small-town Canada? It’s kind of the opposite. I felt like I was the most important—the most intelligent. I was like, “I’m dropping out of school, I’m writing a manifesto, and I’m going to be an artist! I’m going to be a fashion designer!” I’d wear fur coats with bikini tops to school with short shorts and high heels. It was me in my small town reading Vogue, seeing some Dolce & Gabbana pants and making them myself—a super-bootleg version—and feeling like, You guys don’t even know what’s in style. Just perfect teenage self-righteousness. I was popular, but I think it was a lot for people, and by the end I got a really bad reputation of being a slut—the way I presented myself and acted.