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Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting Other Days, a group exhibition with works by German artist Claudia Rega, San Francisco-based Chinese artist Xiao He, and Los Angeles-based artists Frantz Jean-baptiste, Grant Falardeau, Daniela Soberman, Rudik Ovsepyan, and Sinclair Vicisitud.

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Crossing borders between parallel worlds or alternate realities, the exhibition records gaps in time and space along disorientations of slipping traits, places, marks, figures, and characters. From forgotten landscapes of past (or future) lives to séances with sleeping, shut-eyed visions from someone else’s dream, the collected works recover other worlds, and other days, that populate a timeline’s seams with blinks of an eye or rolls of the dice. Stranded somewhere along tragedy and comedy, nostalgia and melancholia, the works’ blurry movements between presences and absences track the act of “expression” in relation to the timing—the drifting and clotting—of a body as an ambiguous sequence rather than a shape or a readymade form. 

But what does it mean for an artwork to be “expressive,” “expressionistic,” or for an act to be “expressively” carried-out? What does it mean for an expression, thought, feeling, or figment to be effectively communicated or conveyed? Unlike the dualistic “inner” and “outer” spatial trajectory—from inward feeling to outward realization—traditionally setup by expressionist modes of painting and sculpture, the expressive practices encountered in this exhibition operate at the border between insides and outsides, between depths and surfaces, between sleeping and waking. Without preserving any certain, stable sense of interior or exterior, the works remain undecidably at their limits, at the horizon between bodies—between night, and other days.

As both archive and premonition, the exhibition poses a fragmented response to the dominant history of expressive traditions of painting and sculpture. This implicit response instigates the relationship between the Western art historical tradition of “expression” as a spatial movement from “inside” (‘inner feeling’) to “outside” (‘outer realization’) and the power structures that regulate-and-control the ways in which bodies of art relate to and interact with actual bodies. Further, the works collectively challenge the ideologies of expressionism as a loosening of realistic forms or an introduction of sub/conscious or internal imaginaries; rather, modes of representation and regulations of realities are called into question at their roots. Against the reduction of a body and expression to inner feelings and outer forms, the exhibition observes a rapidly increasing undecidability of inside and outside when considered as points in time—moments in a moving sequence—or horizons of events, rather than definite positions in space.[1]

Simultaneously turning on distinct (art) historical motifs and ambiguous bodily imprints or autobiographical imageries, the twists and turns of the exhibition’s chronological pathway recur in the split times, absent events, and divided histories expressively dis/connected by the shifting sculptural and painterly terrain of each work. Homelands are built for strangers, childhoods become middle-aged, calendars rewrite maps, figures form their ghosts, colors speak a creole…. Initially and ultimately, this paradoxical space of expression is tracked through movements in time and relations between parallel—intimate and close, but perpetually distanced—bodies.

Structurally, the exhibition is built with a deeper timeline, reaching back to the late 70s with an historical painting by Rudik Ovsepyan. Included alongside the other artists’ current works (and one Ovsepyan’s most recent works as well), the evolutionary process of expressive forms is made accessible within the progression of a single lifetime and within the individual works at the same time. Effectively, this work is a place-holder for the past, a cut or beginning to the sequence providing a (hole or) point of reference for the timeline of the exhibition. This is a way of acting-out the way which past forms are accumulating in present activities: time infects and transforms any sense of space (or place).

What a body lacks, the works recover. Or, what lacks a body, a body covers…. Piece by piece, this defamiliarized and distanced (but estrangedly intimate) scene follows frenetic torsions between memory, reality, history, and fantasy. With each of these torsions, the space of a painting or sculpture results from a twist in a body’s (the artwork, the visitor, or the artist’s) place-in-time.

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Epilogue:

Initially, the exhibition reflects on the Western art historical derivation of expression as a question of transmission between psychic/physical interiors and exteriors (and how an interaction with a surface or an art object records or disintegrates these (assumed) positions of "inners" and "outers”). Ultimately, however, this spatial question became (dis)oriented around problems of differentiating the spatial distinction of inside and outside from the temporal distinction of “before” and “after.” Expression seams itself from this place of indistinction between places and times (and between event and memory). 

By examining expression as a result of timing—the interval of a relative moment—through time and memory, the works seem to sustain a kind of ambiguity or undecidability that makes a clear determination of "who," "what," or "where" unlikely, and, instead, seem to insist on drifting between states (between ‘whens’). One result seems clear: this superficial and likely illusory dichotomy of expression (inner versus outer) appears to be situated similarly in the traditional conception of the process of knowledge, where latent realities are verified through territorialized (think: maps), calculated, and categorized modes of representation. 

A hypothesis: the fact that expression came to be registered as an activity of bringing the inside to the outside might be more a residue of history’s systemic attempts at “knowing” what expression is than it is an attribute or definition of expression in itself. (Expression doesn’t seem to require knowledge or knowing but it still acts on some kind of transmission or (ur-)transfer that has more to do with time or a sequence of events that come between. Knowledge is attached to space more than time (even history tends toward a spatialization of time via knowing). Knowledge surveys. Expression tracks.

(A little topological note on the loss of a cogent perspective in expressive art forms: The opening and closing of Projective Plane is a distortion of space resulting from a placement in time. The projective plane is actually much more about position in time than perspective in space, with the built-in assumption that someone is always moving towards or away from a point at infinity: a hole, a lack, or an origin.)

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[1]  But this not about remarking on the achievements of gestural or other modes of figural or abstract modes that have already contested the relation between bodies and surfaces. For example, where gestural painters are primarily concerned with the relationship between their own bodies and the marks they make in the process of painting, they remain obsessed with their own interiority coming into contact with a surface. Instead of this single instant of (photographic-like) contact between an internalized artist and external surface (or even two externals coming into contact to produce another interior in-between), the works for this exhibition display the multiple temporal dis/orientations of space that an expressive process induces in relation to any individual artwork. (Gesture still represents, or makes an image of, the moment of bodily contact as a kind of traveled space; rather than exposing its drift over time, the body of the artwork and the body of the artist are reduced to separate surfaces or spaces coming into contact.)

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Bios

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Claudia Rega is a contemporary German artist living and working in Münster, Germany. With richly textured yet smoothly flowing surfaces, she works primarily through painting and drawing with oil, acrylic, and oil-stick. Combining landscape perspectives and drifting figural populations, her practice traces aesthetic and historical relations between natural scenes and the power of the young girl. By simultaneously working-through traditions of landscape-paintings and the art historical obsession with the feminine figure, her works locate a vulnerable power between nature—or, more specifically, a changing but precious environment—and femininity. Her expressive practice does not necessarily distinguish between abstraction and figuration: a body and the world that reaches out from (or towards) it occur at the same time, in a continuous painterly sequence. Time, memory, femininity, and (dis)appearing space are recurring horizons of her work.

Some of her most recent (2023) exhibitions and excursions include: G.ART.EN, Como, Selfscape; Stav Art Gallery, New York, USA; Pouch Cove Foundation, Residency, Canada; Inventory, Karl Oskar Gallery, Berlin, D, G; and Volta Basel, Karl Oskar Gallery, Basel, CH.

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Frantz Jean-baptiste (0423, B 1991, Miami) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Los Angeles. He is a first generation American of Haitian descent. He graduated from Art Center in Pasadena and The California College of Arts in San Francisco. His first solo exhibition, Comfort In Safety, is presented by SADE Gallery (Los Angeles). His works have also been featured in recent exhibitions at galleries in Los Angeles and the Bay Area: Band of Vices (Los Angeles); Friend Indeed (Micki Meng) Gallery (San Francisco); Naming Gallery (Oakland); Zoolab (Oakland); ZK Gallery (San Francisco); Merchants of Reality (San Francisco), Mirai Collective (Berkeley); and, Mothership Gallery (Oakland).

{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artist.}

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Sculpting in clay, Falardeau’s busts and figures carry faint suggestions of their faces, as if eroded by time. Grant Falardeau (b.1984, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Falardeau attended Art Center College of Design, Pasadena (2004). He has held solo exhibitions at Sade Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Hilde Gallery, Los Angeles (2018); and Ono Gallery, Los Angeles (2016). His recent group exhibitions include Los Angeles (2023) Bel Ami; Ceramique, Los Angeles (2023); Sandy Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); From the desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles (2019); Ed Mell gallery, Phoenix (2019); Insect Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); and Midland, Los Angeles (2019).

{Biographical Text Courtesy of the Artist.}

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Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel.

{Biographical Text Courtesy of the Artist}

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Daniela Soberman is a first-generation Serbian American self-taught artist living and working in Los Angeles. With her current body of work only recently emerging, Soberman has been the subject of solo exhibitions at both museums and galleries throughout Southern California since 2021, including: Gallery SADE (2022/3), the J. Paul Getty Museum/Long Beach Museum of Art (2022), and the Torrance Art Museum (2022). Her work has also been featured in various two-person and group exhibitions.

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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). From 1966-1969, he attended Terlemesyan Fine Art College in Armenia. In 1974, graduated from the prestigious state State Academy of Theatre and Fine Arts in Yerevan. Facing the widespread destruction of the 1988 Spitak earthquake, as well the evolving political turmoil surrounding his abstract painting, Ovsepyan and his family moved (by boat) to Germany in 1990, where he became a member of the Fine Art Association of Germany (in 1994). There, several solo and group presentations of his work occurred in gallery, state, and museum exhibitions. In 2000, a major exhibition of Ovsepyan’s abstract works with oil and paper produced between 1996-1999 was presented by the German ministry of Education, Science, Research and Culture of Schleswig-Holstein (presented in Kiel). Later that year, Ovsepyan immigrated to the United States and began working on new bodies of work, including Labyrinth, Magaxat, and Zaun, while also beginning to produce mixed-media sculptures.

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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Sinclair Vicisitud is a (born-and-raised) Los Angeles artist who has previously exhibited in group shows at Wönzimer gallery. His first solo exhibition is 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.

Working in oil, acrylic, charcoal, and mixed-media, Vicisitud’s figural, expressive work usually takes-place through a practice of painting that interweaves gestural imprints and studied forms. However, this surface-process is often navigated through the multi-dimensional, sculptural features of the canvas or frame. At times, their (initially) painterly work is totally transformed into a sculptural object.

Beginning with their (chosen) name, their work takes the form of a rattling against the strictures of their own perceived identity. They work with themself as the place of an otherness, an errancy—a churning between darkness and light. Their raw, hauntingly expressive work shifts and moves, but always re-finds its footing through the brutal honesty of their practice: working with what they have, when they have it, and while they can.