Reisig and Taylor
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).
CV.
Interview with Reisig and Taylor at Art Squat (September 2022; by Laura Siebold).
Exhibited Works:
Closed Exhibition: June-August 2022
Flowers
A flower held-still by its image always appears to arrive where it once was, and where it use to be, but never where it already is. Blossoming, a flower remarks on a momentary beginning that is also an end. Withering, a flower remembers the flow of time that falls away from its momentary decay. In either instance, a flower calls aside from its image and forms a petaled oscillation of past, present, and future instants—never staying-still (despite its hushed demeanor). Yet, initially or ultimately, this kaleidoscopic temporality is as much a mark of the instability of the flower being a metonymic object of desire as it is an imprint of the photographic image itself as a displaced place between events and horizons.
It is at this point, upon the paradoxical precipice of this place, where the lenticular Flowers of Reisig and Taylor begin to say their aside to the audience: I am only where I use to be, and I will only be where I am not. An invocation of the place of a displacement, these works form around a hole or gap in photographic time and cultural materiality beginning with the end of the Polaroid picture: the end of the material instant of the image. Originally shot using Polaroid film, these analog photographs turned hybrid digital-physical assemblages have been interrupted, deconstructed, and reconstructed in a lenticular form that works to triangulate a continuous path between the de facto position of an outmoded technology and the de jure proposition of a contemporary oeuvre which reclaims an exited mode.
By adapting the excesses of the lenticular form to the present lack of a proper popular place for film photography, Reisig and Taylor find another formal front of fine art found in the interlacing of the analog and the digital along the seamless, but flickering, fabric of a lenticular lens. With a silent transmission from one isolated instant to another, Flowers accomplishes the quantum feat of furnishing a viewpoint from which one may watch an object act on itself as another. A blossom withers, and a withering blossoms. Standing beside themselves, ecstatically, these redoubled double images do not present an instant image, but, rather, the instant of the image. With each intermittent glance a chance of glimpsing a prior point is placed in the present and announced in the future, yielding an impossible voyeurism impeccably impressed upon the undulating screen of an absence made present, of a memory made of nothing but remembering…. Remember: flowers are always for someone else, never quite held by whoever holds them….
Dual Presentation (Phase 4).
Orchid (2022)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media, Digital/Film Photography)
38 x 30 inches
Limited Edition of 10
Roses (2022)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media, Digital/Film Photography)
38 x 30 inches
Limited Edition of 10
Odilia (2022)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media, Digital/Film Photography)
38 x 30 inches
Limited Edition of 10
Closed Exhibition: March-May 2022
Flicker
Since its irruptive mid-century emergence, Pop Art has sustained an intoxicating aesthetic force and an obsessive cultural compulsion across the material and theoretical dimensions of contemporary artistic production. Continually transgressing the historical limits of taste and consistently redefining the traditional conceptions of the art object, Pop Art seems to insist on a disorientation of the positioning of high and low, object and artwork, repetition and difference, reality and surreality. In other words, as an aesthetic mode or art form that interrogates the time and space of art in itself, Pop Art works to blur the habitual distinctions between the mundane reproducibility of images in mass culture and the striking singularity of the work of art. But what is it, exactly, that insists on this disorientation in Pop Art? And what is the disruptive, intoxicating force through which the elements of Pop are maintained and transformed in the technological contexts of the contemporary world? Ultimately, in the work of Reisig and Taylor, the space of Pop is presented as a distinct temporality. But what is it to work with time as the underlying force of Pop Art? It is this critical line of questioning which is explored through the aperture of Reisig and Taylor’s collection, Flicker (2016-present); incorporating ephemeral images of Pop icons such as Marilyn and Frida Kahlo, these photographic assemblages transpire through a multiplicity of cultural figures and aesthetic forces dancing between stillness and movement, serenity and chaos, familiarity and unknowing.
Awakened and vivified through the technology of lenticular (3D) photography, each piece literally pops, and figuratively flickers, in a momentary paroxysm as it convulses between audience and artwork—realizing a psycho-visual choreography performed between body and image as they simultaneously dissolve and congeal in the effervescent materiality of the work. By splicing together, interweaving, and overlaying various photographs, images, and designs, the pieces collected in this series unleash a radical artistic potentiality as they extend an experimental form of Pop Art that is narcissistically self-obsessed with interrogating the life-force or vitality of the Pop image in itself. It is as if these prints themselves instantiate and represent the joie de vivre of the photographic event—opening and closing, dilating and constricting… a hallucinogenic, virtuosic, blending of medium and matter. Reisig and Taylor’s Flicker shows us what it looks like when Pop Art sees itself in the mirror, watching itself flicker in the lens.
Dual Presentation (Phase 3).
Dorothy (2019)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media and Digital)
33 x 41 inches
3/10 Remaining Editions Available
Emanating from the hypnotic fluorescence of Hollywood nostalgia, the cinematic aura of Dorothy Gale and the atmospheric intoxication of Judy Garland’s celebrity adolescence are projected against a lenticular tissue of lime-lit emotion. Dorothy echoes the whirr of the film reel through the laughs (and screams) of the figurine-figure of Dorothy, the little girl whose generational captivation reiterated and induced the Bildungsroman of a modern America: the coming-of-age of a nation born out of displaced youth and the collective (re-)imagination of “far away” places.
Frida Flowers (2022)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media and Digital)
42 x 37 inches
Limited Edition of 10
Hiding behind the perfumed gesture of an infrared vision, we are left only with a stuttering glance at some unutterable utterance. Her lips, like petals, list the loss (and retrieval) of the beloved in the artificial containment of the treasured.
Lost somewhere in the limelight of a daydream, Alice’s jaded gaze irreverently divides the distance between the really and the real.
Frida Kahlo (2018)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media and Digital)
33 x 41 inches
Limited Edition of 10
As an original painting in lenticular form, this work materially and conceptually antagonizes the generic boundaries of contemporary art and photography through one of the most powerful popular cultural icons of the 20th century. Frida's gender fluency and refusal of established (“qualified”) modes of embodiment are called to forefront of this work as a question about the limits set-up around bodies in general; that is, how do the boundaries and transgressions of the Human form reflect the boundaries and transgressions of the Art form (and what does this reveal about the dimensions of embodiment)?
With the melodramatic gape of an all-too-familiar image, the spectral luminescence of Mona’s surreptitious gaze is tattooed across the jaded expression of an accidental icon, who, despite the crowdedness of her over-populated persona, appears as an isolated stranger between the splits in her perennial becoming—the discrepancies between a singular figure and the mise en abyme of its recursive selves. Doubly marked by the desolate craquelure of the appropriated painting and the butterflies’ populous intrusion upon the scene, Mona displays the aesthetic anatomy of a famous body (of art) and the fissured metamorphosis of this body’s cultural life. The dissimulation of the Mona Lisa’s Vitruvian proportions overtakes the entire dimension of Leonardo’s oeuvre, becoming the metonymic likeness of Fine Art in general, and rewriting the visual poetics of cultural significance over the longue durée: the artwork overtakes the artist, the work of art overtakes art. Between familiarity and estrangement, playfulness and austerity, Mona is a meditation on the historical—and histrionic—constellations of (what is commonly understood to be) the world’s most well known work of art; which is to say, Mona is a séance with the afterlives of a famous portrait, a multi-dimensional genealogy of the subject and its double(s).
Masked Marilyn (2021)
Lenticular Assemblage (Mixed-Media and Digital)
33 x 37 inches
Limited Edition of 10
When the puckered place of identity becomes a plain mark of alienation, the anomalies of a gaze disrupted by the daunting maneuvers of the mouth’s misadventures begin to be revealed in the fragile structures that wrap around the voided locations which were once enlaced with another’s visible address. Now an invisible interface between each individual’s internalized attempts at an external isolation is at once timidly concealed and proudly displayed as a projective geometry of bio-political personhood in a post-pandemic world—affectively engineering the augmented realities that attempt to reanimate the inanimate intimacy and domesticated animality of the orifice as a private part and a public place at one and the same time. To get clear on the situation one must only consider the topology of the mask: it must contain what it excludes, and exhibit what it hides…. (Of course, the one time the whole world is watching it is only because there is something that cannot be seen!)
Having worked with many iconic and influential figures in American popular culture during the last 25 years, Reisig and Taylor have continuously (and collaboratively) advanced the evolution of the photographic image as a mainspring of Pop Art. Beginning in the 1990s with album covers and portraits of hip-hop/ R&B artists—and now with painting and digital art—they have developed a driving body of work reflective of their scope, experimentality, and playfulness as artists, technicians, and photographers. Focusing on (nude) bodies and roving spaces, their photographic work instigates and interrupts the normative barriers between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity and celebrity, sexuality and conviviality, releasing the full force of the aperture as a visual break from the ordinary reason and sedated vision of everyday life. Their photography is opportunity for contact with this rupture through the image’s startling proximity to memory and screens. Whether photographing a celebrity like Tupac Shakur or a personal family friend, they always maintain a certain tension between the world as it is seen and the world as it is lived: preserving an aesthetic demand to see the world as we live it, flickering, and hidden in plain view.
However, their experimentation with the photographic medium was never limited to single genre or an isolated notion of the photographic image; rather, the photograph is recognized as a mutating envoy into questions of light, dimension, and transformation. In its earliest forms, this experimentation played-out in their work with the fluid chemical transformations of analog photography (especially with polaroid film). Erratic treatments were performed in order to infringe on the expected orderly outcome of a development left undisturbed. By manipulating film in the middle of the development process, the artists found ulterior photographic spaces and times that would otherwise go unnoticed in an unperturbed process. Most recently, the artists’ experimentation has evolved in step with diffuse contemporary techniques and technologies, interweaving analog photography, digital photography, painting, collage, and the lens itself in the creation of their lenticular assemblages. These lenticular assemblages are as eclectic in their technicism as they are in their playfully serious suite of subject matter. Ranging from images of popular icons to images of urban spaces and landscapes—all of which continue and extend the mixed practice of their early photographic work—their body of work feeds into itself, moving into the past, the present, and the future at one and the same time. Again and again, their work navigates an eternal return to the question of an image as object, offering a singular view only made available by their structural intervention into the space and time, the before and the after, of the photograph.