Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is holding a closing reception for “Skins, Holes, and Hovels” on Saturday, November 11, Noon - 6pm. The group show includes works by Ari Salka, Erica Everage, and Kento Saisho. .... Discretely, the works personally confront the limits of a body through trans, feminine, and queer practices that question and transform the (normalized) symbolic and material dimensions of an artwork. Collectively, the exhibition takes on an experimental form of resistance against the already-assumed or ready-made categories of a body’s glyphic relation to an “art object.” A viewer is oriented face-to-face with their associations engraved in their habits of viewing, reading, writing, and moving-around an object or surface. Through different modes of a kind of abstract “bas-relief”—or, extractive, inscriptive, dimensional, structural mark-making—this relation between what an object contains or portrays and what it splits or makes-room-for engages problems of recording time or timing, of how an object extends a when. With each artist working-through embodied senses of “deep” and “shallow” time, the works situate critical encounters with the atavistic condensation of the personal, the political, the material, the genetic, and the aesthetic—and the rapid collapse of any distinction between an artist, an art object, and a work of art. Upon entering or exiting the galley-space, someone may (or may not) notice the crowning placement of certain works displaying an apotropaic figure flaunting, or at least exposing and showing-off, its exposed vulva. These works are positioned as guardians of the gallery’s portals, operators of the exhibition’s ins and outs. Two “Sheela na gigs”—hag-like figures—and one self-portrait. Two ancient and one contemporary. All right now. Above the front entrance is “Sheela Motif “(2023), perhaps the most glyphically succinct Sheela form found throughout the exhibition. Clearly identifiable as such, it marks the entry into the gallery as well as the portal into the archaeological language of the exhibition. The other portal-work by Everage, “Sheela Ablaze” (2023) presents the aftermath of this glyph set ablaze by the (Christian) conquerors who initially set out to remove these icons from pre-Christian structures. The figure is set ablaze, blurred in abstraction, but nonetheless remains visible, like a blue-green victim signing through the flames while burning at the stake. The third portal-guardian is Salka’s self-portrait “Green Hands, Blue Clouds” (2018). It is only by chance that the position of the figure in this work resembles the iconic pose of the Sheela na gig, but the semblance is striking nonetheless. After all, even if something only occurs by chance, the fact of its repetition is far from random or arbitrary—something has accumulated over time in order to arrive at this image again (and again). What is that something? That remains to be adequately responded to. But what someone might begin to surmise is a crucial relationship between expression, pose, gesture, and writing; which is to say, there may be a point(-at-infinity) where bodies and letters collide, combine, and condense on the level of the figure, the glyph. At the same time, the serendipitous coordination of these works suggest a lack of response to (historical) questions of how a body comes to be aligned with its organs (or not), and how an identity may (or may not) be derived from the appearance of its body or its organs. In this case, the viewer is pressed to consider not only the role masculine gaze (of the White/Male archaeologist) that initially render these figures as feminine “archaeological objects, but also, in light of the trans embodiments displayed in Salka’s work, to think carefully of the gendering of an object or body in general. The portal-guardians ask: what is at stake in an opening? What does it mean to be (un)marked? How does someone interpret a figure? Considering these critical archaeological (and architectural) questions alongside Salka’s trans poetics, it becomes clear that while Salka works-through an archaeology of an embodied self, Everage is working quite literally with an archaeological procedure of excavation: many of her pigments are ground gemstones (e.g., blue from lapis lazuli, orange-yellow from realgar), and most of her references are directly archaeological (with particular attention to pre-Christian iconographies and artefacts). Saisho is similarly literal in his archaeological references and ideations; however, it is evident that his work is, for the most part, an archaeology of the object in-itself; which is to say, Saisho excavates all the possible spaces and times a single form—in this case, a vessel—may take in relation to an embodied subject’s ability to craft a particular form. (For example, the displacements of empty/full, inside/outside, with “Conjoined Vessel” (2023).) Viewed together and delineated: Salka performs an archaeology of the subject, Saisho performs an archaeology of the object, and Everage performs a meta-archaeology—an archaeology of archaeology (an excavation of its major symptoms and symbolisms). Singularly, Everage is able to directly account for an extrinsic (Western art) history that directly references specific figures, such as the Sheela na gig, while maintaining a mystery and an openness that entices anyone who views the work to “excavate” and perform the conceptual processes of an archaeology for themselves. This activity is particularly clear in the largest of Everage’s works included in the exhibition: “Ggantija (Hidden Architecture)” (2023). Remembering a folded timeline where a series of metamorphoses are recorded with symbols, icons, contours, patterns, and things, the repeated, often doubled (or tripled) positioning of the objects throughout the exhibition builds an economy of timekeeping and repeated traits. (The timescale is the childhood of a megalith….) …. 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). In November, they are invited to be a visiting artist as part of Bennington College’s visiting artist lecture series. 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. Some of the most recent presentations of her work include a solo exhibition titled In Her Image at Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles (on view through February 2024), as well as a group exhibition with The Cooler x Reclaim in Fresno, CA. 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.} …. Image (Installation View).