Shut

Means and Ends—or, Nepotism and its Discontents

Dual Presentation (5)

Workers: objet A.D and Reisig and Taylor

Duration: February 17 - March 19, 2023.

Location: 2680 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90034.

Type: Collaborative Project.

Topology: Diagram

Documentation: Catalogue; Cold Cuts: First Contact—or, Dozens Killed (Installation Text)

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What are the limits of the artwork? What are the limits of the artist? What is produced by delimiting—or unlimiting—the production of these limits? Reveling-in the promiscuous place of these questions of contact, continuity, and containment, this project unfolds from the seams of a relational power of shared space, cohabitated place, and constellations of proximate actions and events. In other words, this exhibition accumulates crossings, contaminations, and transmissions between collaborating artists and split artworks. The exhibited artists objet A.D and Reisig and Taylor are two separate couples from the same family who not only collaborate within their individual pairings, but who have also recently extended their collaboration between all four artists in the family through the production of a new series of experimental lenticular works. Revealing this new lenticular artwork, as well as new independent works by these two pairs of artists, Means and Ends—or, Nepotism and its Discontents sutures together the fragmented process of inherently connected but ultimately discrete agents/artists acting on the same artwork (with various materials deployed across multiple dimensions). Initially and ultimately, the doubled works are positioned along the ambiguous limits that determine the differences between desire, process, and result in the context of relation and collaboration.

A coupling of couples, this redoubled exhibition of collaboration and kinship evolves from Reisig and Taylor Contemporary’s continuing Dual Presentation (2020-Present) of works by these two pairs of collaborating artists. This exhibition format brings-together these seemingly disparate bodies of works in order to examine the kinds of confrontations that occur between art forms operating at apparent extremes (but, nevertheless, at the same time). Beginning at the end of the Dual Presentation, this opening exhibition is the culmination of this experimental process between the gallery-space and its artists-inhabitants. Realizing a nearly unrecognizable way of working between digital, analog, and manual modes of production, the resulting lenticular collaboration revealed in this exhibition transforms 2-dimensional work by objet A.D into 3-dimensional lenticular form. Unbreaking the circle of expression and process, this experimental lenticular work dissolves the limits of any particular technological enclosure encircling the contemporary artwork and demonstrates an involution of habitually separated mediums: showing a way back to (and from) either side of a separation through the middle-ground carved out in the process of collaboration. Additionally, a group of new diptychs by objet A.D, and independently created lenticular works by Reisig and Taylor, will be presented for the first time during the exhibition. Ultimately, if only obliquely, this culmination of the gallery’s “Dual Presentation” demonstrates the force of the space of the gallery in-itself as an extension of the materiality of the artwork, in that it allows for the works gathered in its space to irradiate and infect one another to the point where something else entirely comes to be articulated in the place between these entities. This “place between” is the show’s fundamental curatorial structure.

This exhibition is the gallery’s inaugural event at the new permanent location of Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (located in the Culver City Arts District).

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