There’s no telling time. Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles). April 13 - May 18, 2024. Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú, Pop A. Mr. E: Sol’Sax, Xiao He. The exhibition is on view from April 13 – May 18, 2024. The opening reception for the exhibition is Saturday, April 13, 5pm - 10pm. …. Organized around experimental techniques of photography, lithography, printmaking, bookmaking, sculpture, performance, video, and drawing, the group exhibition circulates through liminal, in-between materialities and questions of memory (forgetting), timekeeping, recording, and (loss of) language. How is time recorded by a body (a work)? How is time constructed? How is a distance from—or transformation of—space stored and produced by an image? How do I learn to speak my own language (for another)? And how do I take care of the sources and bodies of my work?…. How do I learn to tell time without only being told? There’s no telling. (But there is speaking, making, remembering, and holding (time)….) With an emphasis on mixing or melding techniques in the process of responding to these questions, the (de)constructively blended mediums and varying social-consciousnesses carried by the works situate the exhibition in-between media, genres, histories, discourses, autobiographies, identities, and afterlives. Working-through decolonial, anti-imperial, and queer practices, each artwork reconfigures habitual codings of time and space, and different forms of privates and publics, that are lucidly deranged through the unusual forms of “multiples” and imprinted images. Again and again, art histories, family histories, and material histories are seamlessly spoken and spliced-together. Collectively, the works lovingly, intimately, playfully, and carefully find ways of recording, storing, embodying, occupying, and recollecting by re-telling time through their individually distinct vernaculars—their self-fashioned dialects or homemade mother-tongues. Each works finds a unique articulation of place in time, the place of themselves, according to the distance traveled away from (but also towards) their origins. Eventually, the exhibition has something to say about keeping records and tracking the world stored in a mark, fragment, trait, image, or piece. The iterative processes included in the exhibition are offered-up as a remedy or procedure for dismantling hierarchies by working in errantly but intentionally gathered pieces. Beginning in pieces picked-up along the personal trail of individual, and asking how someone might use these pieces to build responses to systemic and “universal” problems. In particular, given the colonial-industrial histories embedded in fields like photography and lithography, and the telling tales embedded in all the carefully-selected materials, many of the works definitively break from a tradition (a type of system) if only to return to it through a more ethical approach. By not only implicitly or explicitly critiquing systemic pathologies (for example: extraction economies involved in lithography or the (white-)male-bourgeois gaze built-into photography), but also living-out and showing the present reality of these ways of working with time, iterative processes are extended as a kind of ‘new science’ for unlocking a place between effective technology and affective transformation. Recalling the recurring question of an artwork’s autonomy versus its reproducibility, the collected iterative processes and the resulting works are presented not simply as ways of copying or reproducing something, but as performances of care for precious, sacred, and irreplaceable (re)sources and the repeated acts of their making. These processes are the production of a vernacular. And the production of a kind of enjoyment…perhaps, even, a joy for the masses (…the joy of the masses?). A shared enjoyment of what is shared. Or a joy that is always here in what is yet to come, and has already happened. Workers: Jackie Castillo, Shabez Jamal, Sarah Plummer, Cesar Herrejon, Magaly Cantú, Pop A. Mr. E: Sol’Sax, Xiao He Jackie Castillo. Through the descent, like the return. 2024. Concrete paver, archival pigment ink, polyester. 12 x 12 x 1.5 inches. Edition 1/3 + 2 AP.