Artists: Ari Salka, Erica Everage, and Kento Saisho.

Duration: October 14 – November 11, 2023.

Location: 2680 South La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034.

Type: Group Exhibition

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Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting a group exhibition of figural and abstract works by three Los Angeles-based artists: Ari Salka, Erica Everage, and Kento Saisho. Drifting between bright and dark, waking and dreaming, the exhibition includes expressively diaristic mixed-media drawings/paintings by Salka, sculpturally and materially driven mixed-technique works by Everage, and multi-dimensional fabricated and forged steel sculptures by Saisho. Although each artist inhabits distinct materials and processes, all of their practices uniquely meld techniques of drawing, painting, sculpting, and writing. Mark by unmark, a shared visual language recurs between layered abstractions of bodies, vessels, voids, imprints, and echoes—between carnal presences and absences. Between skins, holes, and hovels.

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A sealed vessel that gushes, filled with draining. A drawing that tears-up, sobbing. A painting that speaks in tongues, licking itself dry. A tooth to sit on. And even a place to hide your honey hole…. Sometimes more forgotten, sometimes more remembered (more personal), the shifting works track primal traits of figure, mark, flesh, and structure through mysterious deconstructions of glitchy iconographies and slipping materialities. Altered, altared. Each work is radically aware of its own body, and of its position within a system of endlessly oscillating oppositions. Repeatedly marked, filled, or drained, these bodies appear as vessels—but as leaky, shivering, cracked vessels. Determined as much by what they leak or lack as what they hold. Is this body filling-up or being-drained? Ambiguously sacred and cursed, ravished by supernatural charm. Is this a body that floats, or a body that drowns? With a change of state at each blink of a gaze, the objects dissolve any observation with their gushing. Shattered and assembled by their pouring.

Following this dysmorphic movement through sequenced transformations and portaled structures (as thresholds of change), the exhibition winds a symbolic (rite of) passage from the delirious to the lucid and back again. But with each cycle some residue of a reality is left exposed to the viewer as their encounters with the works circulate throughout social, (art) historical, and political determinations of materiality, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. (An Oedipal struggle with the odor always already left lingering in a room.) Estranged, yet still populated by the mythologies in which they emerge, the works keep track of the rituals and bodies they contact. It is at this point of repeated contact with others where the exhibition touches symptoms of power structures present in interactions with objects and images—and their cathexes. Specifically, power is confronted as a shape of desire, a libidinal order. Expressively and Symbolically, the works disrupt dominant distinctions of taste or aesthetic desire, personally regenerating a pleasure principle through trans, feminist, and queer modes of embodiment. However, this communal critical consciousness seems as much a material result as a conceptual strain of the artists’ processes and their collective focus on how to record gesture, meaning, expression, and memory occurring at different times in the same place. Posed as a question: how is one body recorded on the surface of another? Or, how is an encounter between bodies recorded by an object?

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Ari Salka (b. 1993 in Seattle, WA) is an LA-based artist who primarily works through writing, painting, and drawing. Salka holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and MFA in Painting from UCLA (2019). In addition, Salka studied at the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art and received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship in Norfolk, CT (2015). Their most recent solo exhibition was with Lauren Powell Projects (Los Angeles).

Erica Everage (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) is an L.A.-based visual artist. She won a Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award in 2005 for her drawing, which earned her an apprenticeship with the late sculptor Robert Graham, who taught her to sculpt. Erica has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. Her passions for history, feminism, storytelling, and dance all inform her current work as a painter. Currently, a solo exhibition of her work–titled “In Her Image”–is on view at Hotel Figueroa (Los Angeles) through February 2024.

Kento Saisho (he/him) is an artist and metalworker currently based in Los Angeles, CA. He makes vigorously textured and tactile sculptural objects, vessels, and contemporary artifacts in steel that utilize and push the material’s potential for transformation. Born and raised in Salinas, CA, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2016, where he was a Windgate-Lamar Fellowship recipient from the Center for Craft in Asheville, NC. Following this, he completed the Core Fellowship at the Penland School of Craft from 2018-2020. He was also a recipient of the inaugural Emerging Artist Cohort from the American Craft Council (ACC) in 2021 and the 2022 Career Advancement Grant from the Center for Craft. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently represented by Citron Gallery in Asheville, NC.

{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artists}