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Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting A Tender Limb, a group exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artists Ibuki Kuramochi, Marley White, and Allison Arkush. The exhibition includes prints and a sculptural video installation by Kuramochi; mixed-technique and metal sculptures by White; and, mixed-media and ceramic pieces by Arkush. 

The exhibition is on view from January 27 through February 24, 2024.

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Made with clogged drains, broken legs, earthen strands, muddy bows, scraped elbows, tiled feet, drooling lips, and unflushed fish, the viscerally integrated works are tethered between virtual and raw-material mediums as each artist uniquely performs the spaces and times their bodies (of work) take-up. Strung-out along the limits of familiar objects and ordinary encounters, the works collectively but independently unfurl tendrilled connections between subversive forms of intimacy, physicality, memory, affinity, and economy.

Recontextualizing ‘everyday' interactions with items, furnitures, images, screens, trinkets, skins, figments, tangles, tools, morsels and other abeyant entities that congeal or contract as soon as someone looks (away), the exhibition asks how bodies make-room for objects through desire and affection—through taste. But it also asks how conditioned desires, affections, and tastes for objects make-room for (specific types of) bodies. When desire is reduced to metaphors of dis/taste, eating, and consumption, are exchanges with art objects molded in terms of the entrailed insides and outsides of a body’s relation to digestible—bite-sized—edible matter?

Recording or uncutting umbilical ties within and between any single piece, the artworks demonstrate alternatives to devouring the object (eating the other). Against this consumerist construction of desire, a different kind of bodily exchange occurs through liminal, limbinal works with tender, tendered extremities: jutting, tying, leaking, sagging. No inners and no outers, no subjects and no objects, no heres and no theres…. It is difficult to say where one work begins and the other ends…. Only a tenderness, a vulnerability, remains….

But this is not a tenderness that yields or gives-way. This tendered tendril tenderness reaches, extends, and seeks-out, sorely exposing itself to every risk in order to make-contact with an other. To find you.

An offering, a tendered limb.

A tendril clasp, a tender limb.

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Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist.

Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome.

Since 2016, she has studied the uniquely Japanese modern/contemporary dance Butoh from Yoshito Ohno at the world renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi visualizes her performances and body movements as two-dimensional works and video works, exploring the poetic choreographic physicality of Butoh dance and the human body in anatomy.

Kuramochi's artistic practice incorporates Butoh dance, performance, video, installation, and painting, and is deeply rooted in the body, the resonance of thought and body, metamorphosis and post-human feminism.

In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the front cover of LA WEEKLY's special issue " PEOPLE 2019”. Recent exhibitions include work at the Torrance Art Museum, New York Hall of Science, Spring Break Art Show LA, Craiova Art Museum Romania, and artist lectures at the art college in Tokyo and the NY Film Academy.

She is currently living and working in Los Angeles .

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Marley White (b. 1998, Travelers Rest, SC) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. White holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and is currently an instructor in the Fine Art and Product Design departments at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. Using her background in metalworking and woodworking, White’s sculptures imply function and leave us considering their relationship to the body. White’s intimate sculptures document the function of internal adornment. Her work draws a line between the internal and external self through her usage of materials that range from gold to red clay, dug up from her house in the blue ridge mountains, to pig intestines stretched over steel.

Her work is included in the upcoming exhibition at One Trick Pony, Los Angeles, CA and has previously been exhibited at NADA Miami with Carlye Packer, Beth DeWoody’s Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL, Praz Delavallade, Los Angeles, CA, House of Seiko, San Francisco, CA (curated by Mario Ayala); Carlye Packer, Los Angeles, CA (curated by Jason Roussos); Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Paris, FR, and Zuiderzee Museum, Enkhuizen, NL. White a recipient of the Center for Craft Windgate-Lamar Fellowship in 2020 and 2021.

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Allison Arkush was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2010 she moved across the country to attend New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. While at NYU she studied studio art, psychology, and the intersection of these two disciplines; she graduated magna cum laude. In the following years Allison taught ceramics classes, worked as a studio technician and later as studio manager, among many odd jobs.  In 2019 Allison relocated to Lincoln to begin her graduate studies that Fall. Allison was a third-year Fine Art graduate student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln when she first wrote this bio in 2022. After receiving her Masters Degree, she continued to teach sculpture-related classes at UNL, until returning to Los Angeles in 2023.

As an interdisciplinary and multimedia artist Allison’s practice engages a wide and fluctuating range of materials, modalities, and research. She primarily works within the domains of sculpture and installation, which have increasingly come to include her poetry, as well as audio and video components. Allison’s ever-emergent and evolving personal lexicon of symbols and metaphorical motifs connects and deepens the narratives within her work. These individual symbols are germunits, each representing a single germinated concept/object that has proliferated and taken on new associations and meanings, becoming deeply rooted in and vining through her practice.

Her sculptures and installations can function similarly to her poems, but the arrangements are of physical objects and materials rather than language. The germunits act as nouns, materials are the adjectival modifiers, and the assembled sculptures become sentences within the poem. Her larger, more conglomerative works containing multiple germunits, materials, and found objects are object ecosystems. Allison’s most extensively realized works tend to manifest as multi-sensorial installations containing multiple object ecosystems alongside video/audio and other components— thus forming a network or constellation of tableaus within(and between) spaces.

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{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artists.}

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