There’s no telling time. Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú, Xiao He. Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles).

The exhibition is on view from April 13 – May 18, 2024.

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Organized around experimental techniques of photography, lithography, printmaking, bookmaking, sculpture, performance, video, and drawing, the group exhibition circulates through liminal, in-between materialities and questions of memory (forgetting), timekeeping, recording, and (loss of) language. How is time recorded by a body (a work)? How is time constructed? How is a distance from—or transformation of—space stored and produced by an image? How do I learn to speak my own language (for another)? And how do I take care of the sources and bodies of my work?…. How do I learn to tell time without only being told? There’s no telling. (But there is speaking, making, remembering, and holding (time)….)

With an emphasis on mixing or melding techniques in the process of responding to these questions, the (de)constructively blended mediums and varying social-consciousnesses carried by the works situate the exhibition in-between media, genres, histories, discourses, autobiographies, identities, and afterlives. Working-through decolonial, anti-imperial, intimate, and queer practices, each artwork reconfigures habitual codings of time and space, and different forms of privates and publics, that are lucidly deranged through the unusual forms of “multiples” and imprinted images. Again and again, art histories, family histories, and material histories are seamlessly spoken and spliced-together.

Collectively, the works lovingly, intimately, playfully, and carefully find ways of recording, storing, embodying, occupying, and recollecting by re-telling time through their individually distinct vernaculars—their self-fashioned dialects or homemade mother-tongues. Each work finds a unique articulation of place in time, the place of themselves, according to the distance traveled away from (but also toward) their origins. [1]

Eventually, the exhibition has something to say about keeping records and tracking the world stored in a mark, fragment, trait, image, or piece. The iterative processes included in the exhibition are offered-up as remedies or procedures for dismantling hierarchies by working in errantly but intentionally gathered pieces. Beginning in pieces picked-up along the personal trail of an individual, and asking how someone might use these pieces to build responses to systemic and “universal” problems. In particular, given the colonial-industrial histories embedded in fields like photography and lithography, [2] and the telling tales embedded in all the carefully-selected materials, many of the works definitively break from a tradition (a type of system) if only to return to it through a more ethical approach. By not only implicitly or explicitly critiquing systemic pathologies (for example: extraction economies involved in lithography or the (white-)male-bourgeois gaze built-into photography), but also living-out and showing the present reality of these ways of working with time, iterative processes are extended as a kind of ‘new science’ for unlocking a place between effective technology and affective transformation. 

Recalling the recurring question of an artwork’s autonomy versus its reproducibility, the collected iterative processes and the resulting works are presented not simply as ways of copying or reproducing something, but as performances of care for precious, sacred, and irreplaceable (re)sources and the repeated acts of their making. These processes are the production of a vernacular. And the production of a kind of enjoyment…perhaps, even, a joy for the masses (…the joy of the masses?). A shared enjoyment of what is shared. Or a joy that is always here in what is yet to come, and has already happened. [3]

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 [1] The title of the exhibition is itself an inherited expression or vernacular phrase: it’s something my grandmother always use to say in response to change—“There’s no telling time.”

[2]  More specifically, many of the chemical or industrial components used at various stages—from acquisition, to manufacture, to use-consumption—of photographic and lithographic processes are based in the extraction of resources from areas and peoples historically subjected to settler-colonization or imperial (externally domineering) manipulations of indigenous materials for economic purposes realized elsewhere (to the advantage of others). For example, gum arabic (a material used as in food, as well as in lithography and, historically (beginning in 1855), in photography for gum bichromate prints) is a natural resource produced with sap taken from types of the Acacia tree commonly found in the Sahel region of Africa, and especially Sudan. So far, despite the massive international circulation of this material, there has been no observable domestic gains from the over-development of this extraction-economy engineered to suit external demand.

[3]  Or, as one of the artists says, a “proletariat joy.” (Thank you Jackie Castillo for infecting me with this phrase.)

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Artists Bios

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Jackie Castillo is a Los Angeles-based artist working in sculpture, installation, and film photography. Her practice is rooted in examining the isolation and anxiety felt by the working class by investigating the relationship between infrastructure, urban development, and collective memory. Utilizing the visual vernacular of surface, material, and ruins, she examines how an internalized loss of identity may render the self as unreal, estranged, and in various states of invisibility. Her work has been exhibited at The California Museum, The Long Beach Museum of Art, The Mistake Room, the 2022 New Wight Biennial at UCLA Broad Art Center, Charlie James Gallery, As-is Gallery, the Mexican Center for Culture and Cinematic Arts, View/Paul Soto Gallery, and the Material Art Fair in Mexico City. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired her work Turning No.2 as part of the permanent collection. She was awarded the 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship by the California Arts Council.

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Donny Bradfield, also known as Shabez Jamal, is an interdisciplinary artist and educator residing in New Orleans, LA. Born in 1992 in St. Louis, Jamal earned their BA from the University of Missouri - St. Louis and their MFA from Tulane University of Louisiana. Their artistic practice explores memory as it relates to physical, political, and socio-economic spaces. Jamal has received numerous fellowships and awards, including Harvard University’s In the City Fellowship, the Mellon Community Engaged Fellowship, and Washington University’s The Divided City Research Grant. Their work has been displayed in various national and international art spaces, such as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Their work is part of the St. Louis Community College and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art collections, as well as several private collections.

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Sarah Plummer is a collaborative printer, maker, and writer, lately of Australia and more recently of California. She was raised in Sydney and moved to the USA to pursue a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Printmaking) at Rhode Island School of Design before attending Tamarind Institute’s Professional Printer Training Program for collaborative lithography. She has worked on fine-art prints at Wingate Studio, Gemini G.E.L. and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 150th anniversary. Within the last year, she has been operating her own collaborative studio, Speck Editions, on unceded Tongva/Gabrielino land—in Los Angeles. Sarah is captivated by the alchemic expanse of lithography and loves things that seem impossible. While she finds the opportunity to bring well-honored, innovative approaches to artists and their work as one of the greatest pleasures, her work—print and otherwise—leads an investigation into land, memory, material, grief, love, and freedom.

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Cesar Herrejon is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder focusing on mixed media painting and drawing. He is from Birmingham Alabama. Growing up in the deep south, Cesar was involved in the skateboard culture around his teen years and draws influences from these childhood experiences into his work. Currently his work also explores materials foreign to academic artistic expression that parallel and enrich his cultural heritage. He often uses defamiliarized quotations from culture in his work like the surrealism that he finds deeply rooted in Mexican Culture. Art is the only thing that has interested him, and it is the only thing he has found to feel passionate about and build his identity with. His studies and research included printmaking incorporating it with painting and drawing.

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Magaly Cantú is an interdisciplinary artist based in Denton, Texas. She works between a traditional printmaking, drawing and expanded ceramic practices. Through the translation of familial relationships, personal memories, photographs and daydreams. Magaly dissects experiences of girlhood as a Latina an the impacts of navigating in-between tradition and modernization. Magaly has shown work at Arts Fort Worth, 500X Gallery, the University of West Virginia, and the K Space Contemporary. Her work has also been added to multiple collections such as Marais Press print collection at The Hilliard Art Museum and Incisori Contemporanei, Villa Benzi Zecchini, in Caerano di San Marco, Italy. She is currently an M.F. A candidate specializing in printmaking, at the University of North Texas.

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Xiao He (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in San Francisco. Xiao holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Xiao’s works have been exhibited internationally, including 2022 Art Capital (Paris, France), 2021 Biennale di Genova (Genoa, Italy), Upstream Gallery (New York, USA), Huacui Contemporary Art Center (Shanghai, China) and Zhou B Art Center (Chicago, USA). Her artist interviews have been featured on Al-Tiba9 Art Magazine, VoyageLA, and Vogue China, along with residencies awarded at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program (2024) and Kala Art Institute (2023). Her mixed media artists’ book A Collection of Random Thoughts is now part of the permanent collection of Joan Flasch Artists’ Book collection in Chicago. Xiao is also a member of Oil Painters of America and served on the Apex Art New York jury panel.

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{Biographical texts courtesy of the artists.}