With the generous support of The Culver Hotel, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting After, a group exhibition of Los Angeles-based artists confronting the histories, poetics, and politics of portraiture through experimental practices of image-making. The media of the exhibited artworks range across photography, printmaking, painting, drawing, and digital art. The included artists are: Rudik Ovsepyan, Suwichada Busamrong-Press, Erica Everage, Sinclair Vicisitud, objet A.D, and Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor. The exhibition will take place in the hotel’s gallery.

Coming from radically different backgrounds, but all currently living and working in Los Angeles, each of the six artists demonstrate unique ways of rendering the likeness—producing a “portrait”—after a body, a face, a figure, an object, an icon, or a self-image through various materials and techniques. Though highly individuated along the distinct traits or processes of their work, all of the exhibited artworks are implicitly or explicitly involved in the production of a semblance—of creating an image that refers to another (originary) image. However, none of the works merely represent, mime, or reproduce this originary image. Rather than reproducing or representing a subject (or object), each work finds its own way of showing the act of image-making itself by producing a portrait as an erratic, layered, mutating record of an event, an image that remains after a particular moment in time.

While traditions of portraiture have, for the most part, been active in establishing the particular identity or distinctive markers of a notable person or figure through carefully realistic, but intensified or exaggerated, representations, this exhibition displays an evolving contemporary counter-tradition that focuses on expressing or producing time more so than (reproducing) space, and emphasizes invisible relations more so than visible appearances. Collectively, the artists engage in non-representational modes of portraiture that study the splits between vision, memory, language, image, and identity. What results is a series of studies after portraiture, after the advent of the selfie, after the body and its doubles.

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Bios

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Born in 1949 in Leninakan, Armenia, Rudik Ovsepyan became a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR (CCCP) in 1982, eventually being banned for his refusal to paint in the propagandistic style of “social(ist) realism” (while continuing to produce and show abstract works). Ovsepyan’s works are included in public and private collections in Russia, Europe, Israel, Canada, and the United States, including: UNESCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, Armenia, Yerevan; Museum of Modern Art, Georgia, Tblisi; Sparkasse Schleswig-Holstein, Germany; Sparkasse, Muenster, Germany; Provincial Versicherung; Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Kiel, Germany.

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Suwichada Busamrong-Press (b. 1975 in Khonkean, Thailand) is a Thai-American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is an interdisciplinary artist who begins by recalling her memories in writings and transfers them into paintings, sculpture, and performance. Suwichada earned her B.F.A. in interior design and fiber from the College for Creative Studies and her M.Arch. in architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art (both in Detroit). She received her M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design in 2023. Her work has been presented in various group shows around the country, including: Detroit, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles.

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Erica Everage (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) is an L.A.-based visual artist. She won a Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award in 2005 for her drawing, which earned her an apprenticeship with the late sculptor Robert Graham, who taught her to sculpt. Erica has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. Her passions for history, feminism, storytelling, and dance all inform her current work as a painter. Some of the most recent presentations of her work include a solo exhibition titled In Her Image at Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles (on view through February 2024), as well as a group exhibition with The Cooler x Reclaim in Fresno, CA.

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Sinclair Vicisitud is a (born-and-raised) Los Angeles artist who has previously exhibited in group shows at Wönzimer gallery. His first solo exhibition was presented by Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles. He has also participated in Art Market San Francisco and Benefit 2023 with the gallery. Vicisitud’s paintings are both autobiographical and allegorical, equivocally drawn-out from life, literature, and split mythologies.

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Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor are an art duo living in Los Angeles. Both their early works in analog photography and current works in lenticular assemblage are exhibited in galleries throughout the United States, including: The White Room Gallery (Bridgehampton); Julie Zener Gallery (Kentfield, Mill Valley); and Aspen Art Gallery (Aspen). In 2020, they founded Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.

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Formed by Emily Reisig (b. 1993: Los Angeles, California) and Zach Baker (b. 1991: Salem, Massachusetts), “objet A.D” marks the couple’s collaboration. Together, they work between painting, drawing, and sculpture as the basis of their practice, while also collaborating on interstitial works carried-out through curatorial, relational, conceptual, or contextual processes. Imprints and echoes of their own bodies recur across mediums. Currently, they curate independently, while also evolving the exhibition program at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.

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{Biographical information courtesy of the artists.}