….

Ultimately and initially, the program tracks recursive, ethical relations enacted by the work of art through the activity of the “art object” within cycles of (de)colonization and timekeeping (recording). Critically positioned against the violent strictures of nation-states and terrestrial ideologies of settlements (and “settlers”), the gallery seeks to circulate artists/works on an international—but ultimately ex-terrestrial and post-planetary—scale while recursively responding to local, global, microbial, and celestial relations.

The program is localized along artists working in Los Angeles, with particular attention to materials and (intrinsic) economies of the “art object” that have emerged in the wake of post-conceptual challenges to the spaces, places, times, and forces acting-on, or enacted by, an artwork. Materially responding to questions of the dematerialization of artwork, the program examines current tendencies toward involutions (inside-out reversals or returns) of immaterial or ephemeral topics in surfaces, bodies, images, and objects. As the program evolves, local artists and connections established by the gallery are brought into contact with international artists, places, and institutions. (This movement toward national and international connections to local practices begins in 2024.)

(Are these tendencies displaying a kind of post-materialism? (Clearly, all these “posts-” are symptomatic of attempts to reckon with a fallout or an aftermath: what is this contemporary condition?))

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A Note on Economy:

In general, the gallery encounters the market as another medium or dimension of an artwork. A market is already folded into an artwork through the materials of the artwork and the socio-economic positions of an artist that come to be personified in the “art object”: the work of art produces itself (and its subjects) as an effect of its economy. (Even questions of if, when, how, and where anyone encounters an artwork is already a problem of class-position and consumptive practice.) Without a market, there would not be a lack to sustain an artworks unavoidability—the hole made in the place where it is plucked from.

In the context of art fair exhibitions, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary organizes shows as direct encounters with the market, and therefore as a unique way of facing the public and the economy. As a gallery which aims to focalize the often absent political-economic context of exhibitions as part of the literal material of the gallery-space, it is important that the gallery takes-up the space of an art fair as an opportunity to critically engage the economic structures governing the transaction and circulation of artwork. The gallery takes the context of the market as a question of how artworks circulate and what it means for an artwork to become a financial object that is wholly attached to the work of art (or at least its significance), while also having almost no relation to the object or encounter in itself. Therefore, there is the question of the work of art “before and after” the market—before it becomes something else, somewhere else. This problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of art fair projects.