spleen iiiii. July 27 – August 24, 2024. Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is announcing spleen iiiii, a group exhibition built by Allison Arkush, Maccabee Shelley, Luc Trahand, Sinclair Vicisitud. The Opening Reception is Saturday, July 27, 5pm – 10pm at 4478 W Adams Blvd.
This is the first exhibition at the gallery’s new location in West Adams, and is, in part, positioned to address the space (and time) of the gallery itself as a swappable, interchangeable, permutational, recursive, and unusual place: a functional obsolescence. But also as a place that actively participates in the production of material histories and irregular economies that are constructed with surrounding populations. Further, and more specifically, as an exhibition working with equal parts “academic” (credentialed) and “outsider” artists, this lateral or non-hierarchal context might be a way of breaking bad habits of splitting intellectual and affective processes along disciplinary or professional borders.
Beginning speculatively, this exhibition presents sculptural, photographic, installational, textual, and aural processes working-through questions of obsolescence and displaced or repeated (or forgotten) functions. These questions might include: How do paces or speeds of cultural and industrial production—or making things ourselves—prohibitively reproduce bodily and social relations as consumable, ‘done,’ regular, normal, forms of life and death? How might a (relational) work of art disrupt this economic predetermination of how I (do not) connect to others and objects? And what is at stake in a gallery ‘display’ that takes the relations bound-up in artwork as its primary context? Where and when does an artwork, or the exhibition (or the gallery) for that matter, actually take-place? Or, to borrow a phrase from one of the artists (Shelley), when is the “moment of maximum information”?
Circulating through found (discarded, surplus, or obsolete) objects or materials and various approaches to deforming their ordinary uses or memories, the exhibition works to decipher “readymade” un/realities buried in relations between texts, technologies, furniture, shelters, items, devices images, materials, languages, and sounds. These disruptions of a system’s apparent integrity calls on anxieties along the loss of functionality (like a technology taken for granted until it’s broken or dysfunctional). Once a usual function is disrupted, it often becomes impossible to decide where something begins or ends, and whether it is inside or outside (its own systems)—or both at the same time (is a hard-drive ‘finished’ or ‘over’ if it doesn’t remember, or is it forgetting to be something else?). Like an organ that has as its function to operate outside the body, or as the possibility of a hole—the removal of a part from a whole—without total destruction. …Broken records and forgetful functions….
A lack of cause creates a hole: like the removal of a spleen. (And then the hole takes the place of the cause, as with an unfound trauma.) But what about the lack of a function? Or a function that only works to forget how it’s used. Is this also a cause?
Circling the drain of any desire to make sense of something produced and displayed, the exhibition swirls around problems of illegibility, dysfunction, dis/information, and overrepresentation (like this text you are currently reading (or avoiding)).
