The Dual Presentation project is an experimental series of shows (2020-2023) featuring two pairs of collaborating couples from the same family: gallery-namesake artists (Reisig and Taylor), and L.A.-based objet A.D (object 80). In a first instance, this double mode of exhibition literalizes the relations of the gallery by exhibiting the works of related artists embedded in the space of this family-owned gallery. In other words, by beginning with the work of the family that founds the gallery, this self-reflexive project enunciates the position of the gallery following from the fragmentation of an originary “I,” a (double) split between two couples. Instead of obscuring the act of genesis through which the gallery is conceived, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary acts-out the genesis of the gallery as a public and documented track. Evolving a phenomenological and analytical context for the gallery to take-place through this form of autocritique, the gallery begins by giving an account of itself through the split relations of its constituents. This literalization of the family’s relations as the initial space of the gallery is a way of beginning at the inherited borders of artwork (and boundaries of the gallery) without taking those borders for granted, or making any assumptions about what a gallery is already (or where the role of the artist ends); rather, the gallery operates—in all its structural, theoretical, and practical dimensions—as a position in motion (a position which is always at least doubled). This is an experiment with the limits and reach of an organic, stochastic structure (a family; a couple) presented as a possible horizon of a self-reflexive gallery that situates itself as a work of art (as well as an envoy). This is a way of beginning with oneself in the place of another.

At the beginning we are artists working together as a family, so our connection wasn’t through a particular movement, genre, or style—but through proximity, kinship, and dependence. A kind of community. But not a chosen community. This is why we are interested in analyzing the gallery’s structure as much as the art historical context of the artists and artworks we support. Consequently, this initial instance of the gallery is a way of interrogating the contemporary limits of the work of art in order to transparently question the place of the gallery (and practice this question as the pace of the gallery) in relation to artists and the tangles of subjects/objects that arrive at this place. To articulate this interrogation precisely: Is the gallery itself a work of art? Is the artwork a form of work? And, what is the revolutionary role or potential of the gallery as a form of art/work? The gallery instantiates this questioning as its primary process (rhetorically as well as architecturally). Further, working non-hierarchically with the artist in the production of the Dual Presentation, the gallery examines generative roles at play in the place of the gallery by centering the power of the “other” against the unobscured “self” of the gallery (“Reisig and Taylor”). Though, at the same time, by focusing on the work of collaborating artists, and including the split/reflexive subjectivity of “Reisig and Taylor” as place and participant, the gallery also displays what is decentered between two artists producing a single artwork, or two pairs populating a singular exhibition—and one entity operating in (at least) two ways. The work of finding a center, if only to decenter or destabilize this position, is the experimental form the gallery takes-up in the Dual Presentation. To take seriously the place, position, and power of the gallery is to ask what is at stake in the work of art, and to display these stakes as transparent sheets separating the artwork from itself.

[Works and presentations that took-place through the Dual Presentation are accessible via the gallery’s archive. Please contact the gallery@reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com if you would like to view the gallery’s archive.]