Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... by Saun Santipreecha. This interdisciplinary, multi-media installation is Santipreecha’s second exhibition at the Los Angeles location, and the third presentation of his work by the gallery (following his recent solo presentation in Rome). The immersive work combines sculpture, sound, surface, video, and (live) performance, transforming the gallery into a spontaneously and relationally composed encounter that will endlessly change in response to bodies’ pathways along the space over time.

The exhibition is on view from May 25 through June 22, 2024. The opening reception for the exhibition is Saturday, May 25, 5pm - 10pm.

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Beginning at its title, the work draws inspiration from the writings of Samuel Beckett, with a particular investment in the works of The Trilogy (1951-3); namely, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. With this connection in mind, the timing of the exhibition accounts for the event of the 2024 Beckett Conference, Beckett and Justice, which is taking place June 6 – 8 at California State University, Los Angeles. Santipreecha is set to present at the Conference, and will be speaking about the engagement of his artistic practice with the works of Beckett. Referencing his text on the ethical, sound-derived concept of “relational modularity,” Santipreecha will discuss his work in response to the metamorphic structures of language, materiality, sensation, and embodiment in Beckett’s works.

The relational structure of the installation begins with the visitor’s (a subject’s) entry into the exhibition where they will immediately find themselves populating, (dis)ordering, and distorting the shifting system of sounds sculpting the room of the gallery along the contours of a moving body. And while responding to the wandering movements of a visitor’s body, the underlying architecture of the works will also be incorporating various spatial and temporal dimensions of the gallery that are usually ‘left-out’ or regarded as collateral. The outside of the gallery will be (sonically) brought to the inside, and the ‘outer’ subject (a visitor) is brought to the inner-most core of the gallery: its hole, a void (making-room for an other…). The gallery’s physical architecture is deconstructed and rebuilt through sound. However, in this context, ‘the gallery’ and ‘the exhibition’ only occurs or takes place in the event of an encounter with a visitor: there is no gallery, no installation, without somebody being present.

It is in this sense of something being assembled in the same moment as being said where Santipreecha initially finds a sincere and intimate connection to the works of Beckett. This connection is especially evident when considered in relation to The Unnamable, where the reader and the text’s rambling narrator share in the process of constantly displacing and re-shaping the metamorphic body of the narrator with slips of the tongue and misrecognized glimpses of themselves in others. One moment the narrator is some malformed man jammed-into a jar working as a signpost for a local spot, and in the next he is a nearly featureless egg shaped something like an urn or a curled-up, limbless fetus that fills it. What the narrator says, what the reader writes, the body—of the narrator and the text itself—become. In other words, The Unnamable effaces any distance between what is being said and what is being shaped: what form a figure takes as a body. It is precisely at this place between language, sound, body, and ideology where the exhibition begins to find alternative pathways between subjects and systems, selves and others, through atonal spaces of sound.[1]

Santipreecha articulates this knotted place, this tangled sonic interval between bodies, as a “relational modularity,” or the unstoppable slippage of a body between mythological systems and their (dis)array—between a body and other bodies. For Santipreecha, the slippages and distortions of a body as a relational context coming between regulatory structures and drifting morphologies, multitudes and monads, provides an opportunity to reconfigure the ethical possibilities of what it means for someone to relate to someone else (or somewhere else).

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“My work is grounded in the position of questioning—or rather the questioning of position—in relation to frames and systems while acknowledging the inevitable necessity for frame and form to carry intent and meaning, to enable dialogue—ouroboros; the act of breaking myth being itself a form of myth-making.

My work as a whole is the form and process through and within which many of my inquires take, the oscillation between ideas and emotions, the investigation of our need to find meaning which leads to the theme of mythology and myth-making, itself another kind of frame and form which shapes and molds our perceptions of the world.”

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Saun Santipreecha is an interdisciplinary artist from Thailand who works in both visual and aural mediums. His artistic route in both disciplines began simultaneously, studying privately with two Thai Silpathorn Award recipients for Thai contemporary artists, visual artist Chalermchai Kositpipat and classical pianist/composer Nat Yontararak amongst other tutors and mentors. In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles where he pursued a career in music composition for film, collaborating with artists from multiple disciplines including fashion and video games while also working independently on projects culminating in the experimental album Dandelye (2022). His compositional work in film, TV, and fashion has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as at New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has also worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski.

He had his debut solo exhibition as an artist in July, 2023 with his exhibition Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA. His first international solo exhibition, Per/formative Cities | A Nest of Triptychal Performances, engages with three novels by Italo Calvino through a multimedia sound installation (February 29 – March 15 in Rome, Italy). His second solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is titled ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... and coincides with his participation as a panel speaker at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society—Beckett and Justice—at California State University, Los Angeles (the exhibition is on view May 25 – June 22, 2024).

His work has been in various group exhibitions in Incheon National University, South Korea, New York, and Los Angeles, and he continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines.

He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

{Biographical text courtesy of the artist.}

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[1] Underscoring the historical-aesthetic relation between (national) myth-making and normative emotional and—supposedly—subjective associations with tonal structure or tonality, the atonality of Santipreecha’s work is where he situates the possibility for imagining somewhere else beyond the readymade mythologies we inhabit through music, film, literature, and popular cultural media. (He is particularly critical of this relation between tonal structure in music or sound and nationalistic myth-making in the context of cinema and Hollywood film-making. In this context, film scores are almost always ideologically rendered through readymade tonal structures that situate a particular (bodily) subjective response to the combination of visual and aural content employed by the film. Think of the shrieking score for a horror movie versus a light-hearted soundtrack for a popular Romance-Comedy.)