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Wake is an experimental group show taking-place at Art Market San Francisco in April 2023. The project presents mixed-media abstract work, lenticular photography, bronze sculpture, painting, and drawing. Surrounded by works by Sinclair Vicisitud, objet A.D, and Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor, Armenian-born artist Rudik Ovsepyan (b. 1949) makes his debut at the gallery with an introductory selection of pivotal mixed-media works that began to awaken during the early 1990s. This will be the first time his work has been shown at an international art fair in the United States. (His work has been shown—and is currently housed—in several museum collections in Germany and Eastern Europe). Focusing on resounding themes of displacement, and the violence—or beauty!—of (b)orders, his work explores conscious accounts and unconscious drives pulsating his personal life and the history of the Armenian diaspora. With the rippling time and fractured history of Ovsepyan’s work forming the context for the work of all four artists, Wake structures itself as a series of movements in and out of consciousness, working with problems of sequence and memory, diachrony and synchrony, regression and recollection, by looping-together works that the gallery has already shown with work that has yet to be seen. The exhibition is a simultaneous movement in opposite directions: Ovsepyan’s work is set to wake in the sense of rising from darkness or obscurity; the other works return in wake of their emergence, in attendance at their own wake.

As the exhibition title begins to indicate, the plucked strands of this show are problems of temporality, (un)consciousness, sequence, and presentation (or ceremony); or, the question of how to encounter the same thing at different times, or different things at the same time? Equivocally, “Wake” suggests (commandingly) the act of arising from sleep as much as it refers to falling into death (while in view of others). In either case an other is present, either commanding or watching. This situates both a beginning and end—or, two moments of displacement: one from sleep, one from life. But it also suggests the mark of an aftermath, the observation of a passing-through… the wake of an object or an event, a rippling of time…. This is the primordial disturbance encountered in the exhibition: the rippling around each of the works…. Something like watching stones dropped into the dark pools of forgetting, but without knowing whether the stones are rising or falling….

In both Ovsepyan’s early figurative work and his later abstract work, the concurrent aesthetic influence of various movements of modern and contemporary art, as well as medieval Armenian manuscripts, is present across series. These medieval manuscripts are inscribed with highly decorative Armenian script and sophisticatedly organized, puzzle-like structures/geometries formed through colorfully patterned borders. Similarly, his work is also evidently influenced by the colorful and ornately arranged imagery of traditional Armenian rugs. (Though, he often revisions such imagery with a monochromatic palette, as in the two included untitled works from 2009 and 2011.) Initially and ultimately, however, Ovsepyan appears to be most energetically influenced by his own prolific and unrepentant mode of production. Effortlessly, but industriously, his work springs—wakes—from his work (in the wake of his work…). His work continually cycles. He is constantly moving from one series to the next, always exhausting a particular way of working until it comes to be folded into the next phase. And although each series or body of work has its own peculiarities, it is clear that, sequentially, the central matter of his work is simply the passage of time (and space) consumed by making them. This sense of preserving lost time comes clearly into view in his “mummified” works, eternally resting between here and hereafter (as with the included “mumie” (German for “mummy”) piece from 2010). These “mummified” pieces also recall the ancient historical connections between Egypt and Armenia. Mapping borders between worlds upon the bodies of his work, his art forms a record of a life of displacement. Consuming the refuse of his immigrations—cardboard, newspaper, found objects—his work builds the home he was never permitted to have (using all he has left). (Ovsepyan is a former member of the Fine Art Association of the USSR, having been banned for his refusal to paint in the propagandistic style of “social realism.”)

Gravitationally tied to Ovsepyan’s tidal body work, the themes of displacement, (im)permanence, memory, history (or temporality), consumption, and transformation are the central streams of the entire exhibition. Of course, coursing through all of these themes are the political and economic forces that drive migration, accumulation, and distribution (of culture, space, and wealth). As an art fair exhibition and therefore a condensed engagement with the market, this exhibitive project must also form questions of political-economic structures (like “the market”) that govern or circulate works of art as financial objects. Confronting this context directly, the exhibition asks: How are artists, artworks, and exhibitions historically, conceptually, and economically linked by the fact of display and being made-visible in public? What is the difference between a gallery exhibition and a show organized for an art fair (or an art market)? What is the role of the gallery-space in rendering diachronic connections between works exhibited at the same time, as well as in separate exhibitions? How might the gallery operate as a synchronic nexus between problems of political-economy and realizations of cultural-production? These are some of the general questions the gallery begins to engage through specificity of the artists and works exhibited in the context of Art Market San Francisco.

Harboring this critical demeanor, the group of works form a community and temporary homeland that exists everywhere and nowhere, consisting entirely in the relations between the works and the artists, beyond the enclosure of any single (b)order. But, no matter what, the artwork remains tied to the market (if only by the effects of desire and consumption.) The place of this contradiction—a beyond that is also within—constructs the space of the gallery/booth as a kind of tension or torsion between works and worlds. On the level of the materiality of the works, the resonances are perhaps most evident in Vicisitud’s and Ovsepyan’s use of leftover, discarded, and recycled materials as the surfaces and subjectiles of their work. Circularly, both artists consume what has already been consumed. But, across all of the works, the traces of memory—or, with Vicisitud’s work, the physical marks of being made—are the sinews of the show. In the included collaborative lenticular work by objet A.D and Chris Reisig & Leeza Taylor, a not-so-familiar familial scene twitches between the place of some scene recalled and the displacement of a dream. This undecidability of here or there, then or now, is the oscillating movement guiding encounters with each of the works. The use of the lenticular medium by Chris Reisig and Leeza Taylor throughout the exhibition is a core engine of this oscillation insofar as it is a “pop” material being adapted its most minimal (and yet most self-conscious) form, displaced as a membrane between vision, hallucination, and memory in Orchid, Odilia, and Aspen Grove. In effect, the lenticular lens positions a border between un/realities. Awakening this betweenness, the undecidable, non-orientable spaces and figures in sculptures and paintings/drawings by objet A.D insist on the impossibility of determining the precise placement of a border, while nevertheless insisting on the shifting reality realized by the simple placement of a line or limit. Thus, paradoxically, it is precisely this borderless border, this shifting limit between emergence and disappearance, that is repeatedly set adrift and re-found between each work included in the exhibition.

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A Note on Economy:

In the context of art fair exhibitions such as this, 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 particular problem-place of vision, desire, object, consumption, and exchange structures the critical formulation of Wake.

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