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)). __________ Allison Arkush was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. In 2010 she moved across the country to attend New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. While at NYU she studied studio art, psychology, and the intersection of these two disciplines; she graduated magna cum laude. In the following years Allison taught ceramics classes, worked as a studio technician and later as studio manager, among many odd jobs.  In 2019 Allison relocated to Lincoln to begin her graduate studies that Fall. Allison was a third-year Fine Art graduate student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln when she first wrote this bio in 2022. After receiving her Masters Degree, she continued to teach sculpture-related classes at UNL, until returning to Los Angeles in 2023. | Born in Los Angeles, Maccabee Shelley studied environmental and Earth sciences before earning degrees in studio art and ceramics. Intrigued by the perception and projection of value and obsolescence, Maccabee translates refuse through various materials and processes exploring the space between object, image, and experience. | French-American interdisciplinary artist Luc Trahand’s work spans multiple mediums and forms from music and sound to language, film, and movement. | Sinclair Vicisitud is a (born-and-raised) Los Angeles artist. Working in mixed-techniques and mixed-media, Vicisitud’s figural, expressive work usually takes-place through a practice of painting that interweaves gestural imprints and studied forms. However, this surface-process is often navigated through the multi-dimensional, sculptural features of the canvas or frame. At times, their (initially) painterly work is totally transformed into a sculptural object. ____________________ Image: Maccabee Shelley. Memory. 2024. Cast glass and electronics.