[We are currently building a gallery/program through Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles). We work with the gallery itself as a work of land art (and a workplace).]

gallery, land

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is an experimental gallery and research site based in Los Angeles. As a medium for (art)work, the gallery operates through an evolving program at its current location (4478 W Adams Boulevard), as well as through off-site projects and collaborative presentations that take-place locally and internationally. Working against settled constructions of space, place, and time, the gallery inhabits a drifting, germinal and adaptive—seeding and blooming—structure that sustains consciousness through critical analysis and careful documentation. By working-through the time and space (or the place) of the gallery, we orient the gallery as a kind of land or land-art: as a planetary transformation over a duration of time. This transformation is carried-out through work. A primordial work—a populating æffect of the stars.

We begin with the gallery as a work of art: an artwork built with others. A work. And a marketplace: a logic of exchange. And a technique of a body: a technique of survival. But this is a survival that makes-room for emerging forms of life, and is not only an instinctual response to the imminent threat of death or disappearance. An afterlife that is already present, and still future. (A surplus scarcity.)

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Some recurring questions: How does a gallery keep-up with itself? How does it keep-track of its rates and productions (and its rates of production)? What is the language of this gallery and how does that relate its structures, functions, programs, and exhibitions? (These questions have been asked before, beginning at least in the 60s in Europe and the US, but since the concept of the gallery still seems slippery, and relatively unaccounted for compared to collectives, collections, and museums—and even fairs and markets to some extent—it seems relevant to keep asking these questions (again and again).)

(If we are going to take-up space, then we should give an account of ourselves, of our causes and our lacks and our lags.)

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Initiated in 2020, the gallery functions independently as an open source for artists, audiences, curators, collectors, and critics. The gallery builds a general economy—and physical place—between the conceptual forms, the cultural positions, and the material productions of contemporary art with the objective of supporting artists working in all mediums and dimensions of the present (and future) moment. The current program focuses on experimental work and insurgent or liminal processes (work that is actively at the margins of identity, material, economy, or history). The trajectory of the gallery is non-linear, non-teleological, and anti-imperial. As an archive and a community, the gallery works to develop ethical ways of keeping time, connecting spaces, and circulating alternative economies that usurp, disorient or reorient “art markets.”

What is an artwork? What is an artist? What is a gallery? And how might a gallery begin to give an account of itself (or at least of its disappearances and displacements)? These basic but recurring and unanswered questions are the gallery’s foundational problems.

It is the place of the gallery (and its inhabitants) to investigate how the historical/material conditions of an “art object”—including the gallery itself—are either reproduced, translated, challenged, or disinherited with each act of exhibition. Rather than focusing on any particular movement or theory, the program demonstrates a simultaneity of movements and theories at work along any single exhibition, artwork, object, or artist. (The contemporary artwork appears in more than one place, at more than one time.)

Through analytic and historical documentation of exhibitions, works, and artists, the gallery’s form is critically driven in response to its own processes, materials, and records: light, time, body, language, and space. The gallery’s program is performed through physical exhibitions, analytical texts, exhibition catalogues, historical documentations, collaborative publications, and virtual collections, as well off-site events or projects. Orienting itself as a resource, and a vehicle of research and experimentation, as much as a formal exhibition space, the catalogues and other publications produced by the gallery provide a relational structure that extends beyond the physical premises.

{Read about the gallery’s current program here: XY}

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4478

The gallery is a public (re)source.

Our plan is to continue to build a place and position capable of addressing ‘everyday’ or ordinary realities through works of art. (To address work through work.) For us, that is a foundation of the gallery: to be a place in time, and a kind of work, that breaks-up the habits that congeal into conditioned and normalized forms of life and death (ready to be bought and sold). The gallery can disrupt this regular exchange and offer active, de/constructive techniques of uncovering, deciphering, transforming, deranging, or exiting readymade systems and relations.

Part of the work of the gallery is to recognize the ways in which the place, history, neighborhood, and architecture structure the spacetime of the gallery and the ways in which exhibitions are curated, installed, and constructed. By sustaining a roving, adaptive program that evolves in relation to each space we occupy, we are building a way of working that recognizes the gallery as an active force, agent, and participant in each exhibition or event it holds.

Broadly, we are continuing to build a program focused on experimental practices that work-through bodies, materials, languages, and techniques in response to systems of normalization and consumption. Practices that not only notice “problems” but also actively work-through problems, symptoms, sicknesses, and (bad) habits. Artworks that repair, advance, or combat the worlds that make them. Works that disrupt ordinary ‘forms’ and ‘ways’ of life (and death). More narrowly, and in particular, the program is turning toward exhibitions and projects that work between systems of cultural production, knowledge production, social production… between (academic or technical) research, (ordinary) labor, (daily) ritual, and aesthetic desire (or distaste). Eventually, by pushing interdisciplinary, and non-disciplinary—as well as ‘post-’ studio and ‘post-’ relational—(art)work beyond the framing of the art historical context, we are asking “where is the artwork”? Where does an artwork take-place? Or, what are its (lost) causes, and its results or æffects? As always, we are asking basic questions that are often difficult to respond to. We are keeping-track of ourselves.

[Summer 2024.]