Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is holding a closing reception for Saun Santipreecha’s debut solo exhibition: “Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk.” The reception will be held from Noon - 6pm on Saturday, July 29. The exhibition catalogue will be available at the gallery. Equipping a spectator with an infrared vision of a body (or its absence) passing through all the ideological residues and material layers that make it visible, the exhibition asks me to encounter myself as a repeatedly reoriented and re-inscribed position where the visual, the sonic, and the performative are always already translating between realities and mythologies. This constant abduction and repositioning of a body is put directly in relation to the gaze and the politics of in/visibility in the mixed media painting titled “Excavation.” Performing an archaeology of the politics of in/visibility, the painting’s burning ultraviolet hues, whose liberally applied impasto strokes flood the painting’s orthogonal plane, are dreamt from the artist’s obsession with Richard Mosse’s photographs of child-soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Shot with Kodak infrared film, these photographs supply a disturbingly surreal haze of a world stained pink with childlike wonder.) Turning this infra-visible gaze towards himself, strung with an image of the Chao Phraya from his childhood home in Bangkok, “Excavation” repositions this archaeological mode and transforms a photographic technique of vision into an obscure record that acts-out the place of embodied memory—of trauma and its place along a childhood. Following this interrogative path throughout, the works collectively demonstrate how multiple channels of personal memories, historical narratives, political regulations, and (an-)aesthetic—or propagandistic—regimes are incorporated and synthesized by an individual. Each material carries its own symbolism, every mode molds its own version of the truth. …. “This exhibition brings together the various strands of my practices over the years and is the first body of work which for me best embodies and unifies these various threads, inquiries, and materials I’ve explored over the many years and numerous creative mediums I’ve worked in. The title itself, “Dandelye,” first began life as the title of an attempted novel (and later a book of narrative poetry) I worked on for five years which remains unfinished but, like the seeds of a dandelion, has carried on life as an album (released last year) and now has reached full bloom in this body of work which brings together the visual, the aural and the performative. The subtitle “Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk” began life within that same text, acknowledging the ultimate frame we cannot break out of—Time, or rather our perception of it—which was in many ways where the book had left off, now completed with a sense of forward momentum. To quote a phrase that has stayed with me for many years from one of the writers whose work has influenced me most, Samuel Beckett, from his novel “The Unnamable”: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ And on we walk.” …. Saun Santipreecha “Excavation (or The Vagaries of the Exposed)”, 2023 Oil, Shellac, Gravel, Cheesecloth, Rope, Clay, Coconut Shells, and Ash on Canvas. 42 x 78 inches