DANDELYE— OR, BENEATH THIS RIVER’S TEMPO’D TIME WE WALK

Artist: Saun Santipreecha

Duration: July 1 - 29, 2023

Location: 2680 South La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034.

Type: Debut Solo Exhibition

Gallery: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary

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Please contact the gallery with any inquiries via email at: gallery@reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com

Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is honored to present the debut solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based Thai artist Saun Santipreecha. Emerging from an expansive multidisciplinary practice, the exhibited body of work includes mixed-media paintings and sculpture, as well as a sound installation (with a light/visual component) and a collaborative performance piece. Painted, burned, sculpted, threaded, shellacked, played, and composed, the technical process of each work is a virtuosic performance of how a body continues to become beyond any given limits, between any momentary state.

Seemingly spewing from the core of the earth at the same time as falling from some far celestial reach, Santipreecha’s work takes-place in the ashen form of a secreted, or secreted, catastrophe blistering at the bottom of a smoke-rimmed crater. At the beginning of a pre-history, or at the end of a history on the verge of erasure. Arriving after the massacre has already been cleaned-up, but hemorrhaged stains of faded blood still mark the place where a body once was. Like the light of the stars, the spectacle arrives long after the violent inferno: what is encountered is made serene by a sense of distance from disaster. We are safe now, and so the search for meaning begins: an interpretation of the whispers and thuds of ghosts. But this search for meaning incites its own event. With each sound, site, cite, or sight marking a place we have already been without ever having gone there, the collected works perform a simultaneous movement into the past and the future by performing the act(s) of myth-making and myth-breaking in a single gesture: the cannibal cycle of the serpent devouring itself until there’s nothing to do but to begin eating all over again. The works starve themselves in order to gorge on their meaning. Crucially, however, this movement is not only directional and orientational, nor only theoretical. This movement is deeply embodied; it is the act of being moved as a combination of thought and emotion that occurs as a kind of personal myth-making, a (temporary) place given to meaning in the position or relation of the viewer to an artwork or experience. Left gazing at the stars with an ear to the soil, the exhibition walks a sidereality of skies beneath our feet….

Gazing toward the largest work presented in the exhibition, a tryptic titled Three Elegies, the archaeological layers of witnessing, uncovering, and interpreting the sense of catastrophe suggested by the work’s igneous surface of cement and shellac appears intimately tied to the artist’s quest for meaning between the limits of personal experience and the histories of others—and the borders of other places. Describing his process with regard to this work, Santipreecha writes,

Three Elegies is a tangential reference to the works of one of my favorite poets, Edith Sitwell and her “Three Rustic Elegies.” I’ve been struck for a long time by those poems and had always wanted to engage in a kind of dialogue with them but always felt unable to directly. This triptych began as a contemplation on some similar themes as the poems as well as the stoicism many women including my mother maintain through harsh and abusive situations. It began too as a way of contemplating the war in Ukraine and the questioning of borders, hence the use of fragmented dropcloth worked over with various inks and dyes, gessos and shellac with shredded paper and being walked over for days.

This framing of universal events—or events occurring elsewhere but nonetheless shared as a public spectacle—through personal and domestic experience is a constant mode of contextualization and communication across all of the works. But the singularities and specific dialogues between materials and concepts are always unique to each work. With Three Elegies, the juxtaposition of different textures and the terrestrial grounding of cement against the ethereality of the other materials used (shellac, paint, paper, ash…) compose a somber and nearly monumental sense of reflective time. Though, despite the large scale of the works, a viewer arrives at these surfaces as worn tomes demanding to be read in private. Publicly visible, marked, and shared—but personally and private framed, communicated, and transformed.

Characteristic of much of his surface and sculptural works (and figurally resonant with his sonic and filmic works), the materials of Three Elegies form a kind of grammar for anyone to inhabit. However, like any language, what sustains this grammar is not the materials in isolation, but their relations to one another and their relations to their own self-difference. Specifically, Santipreecha refers to this doubly split relationality of materials as their “symbolic dualisms”: the tensions, or antagonisms, between different states, phases, or meanings associated with particular materials. With concrete, for example, there is a dualism between its symbolism as the hardened pedestal of civilization and its initially liquid form (and the ultimately burdensome and brittle result). With shellac, there is a tension between the natural beauty it captures and re-enacts, its unique origins as a South East Asian (and particularly Thai) resource, and the colonial extraction economies which now make it a “globally” available material. Writing and speaking these materials together, these tensions are presented without overdetermination—this historical context is not necessary to perceive the tension of the materials themselves: one stiff, one flowing; one grey and bleak, one shimmering and bright. Together, they form a minimal pairing of contrasts or contrapositions that allow a spectator to step into metaphors as material activities. Across all media—music, sound, light, surface—the ephemerality of the work rests in the limbo of the dualism of something recorded or mechanized but endlessly changing and evolving in relation to context and contingency.

The exhibition’s initial title, Dandelye, which is also the title of the artist’s recent solo album (2022), signals the speculative and spectral processes at the kernel of his metamorphic work. As an English spelling of a Thai translation of an English word (‘dandelion’), “Dandelye” disarticulates the act of transmission that occurs between Santipreecha’s alienated homeland and the English language (and new home) he inhabits. Although he was born in Thailand, English is his first-language. While English provides him with the opportunity to ravel himself in the far-reaching formations of an imperial lettered city, it also articulates a rift between the relations that form his personal identity and the originary placement that dictates his nationality. This slippery metamorphosis between languages and positions, between Thai and English, shapes an interstitial mother-tongue through the ventricular irregularity of an asymmetrical vernacular: being Thai and speaking English. This tension between ‘what is’ and ‘who does’ is extended and reiterated in the theatrically enunciated line “Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk,” the lost title of a novel never fully realized. The first line contains a complex process finely composed in a fragile form set adrift; the second line remembers the imperial tendency to map the Vitruvian proportions of the human meter onto the apparent formlessness of what is already. The errant—but channeled—movement of a river versus the arithmetic timekeeping of a tempo. Performing this rift or cut with the mark of a dash (—), the title suggests a tension between the fragility of natural forms and the anthropomorphic pace imposed on the world by transforming matter into material or structure. Throughout Santipreecha’s work, something loss becomes something gained, and some end becomes some new beginning. An infinity evolves from an endless oscillation of translations, transformations, and permutations.

Ultimately or initially, Santipreecha works with a body’s position within the frames, systems, and narratives it comes to inhabit (and, eventually, overturn or rewrite). Rhetorically and gesturally, this positionality is (temporarily) located by the form of questioning taken-up by any particular work or body. Each work is an inquiry. The work rubs-up against the (historical) boundaries of relational aesthetics from the position of the individual, from the perspective of a secluded and surreptitious subject who winds their isolation around the spaces and times of the others that remind us that any separation is also a point of connection. The intersubjective places between bodies, narratives, and events are thrown back onto the canvas, and then torn back down, in a single gesture moving between distinct senses and disparate media.

A myth is made. A myth is broken. Endlessly and without origin. Set adrift along the waters of an apparition, a drunken boat finds the shore by the hallucinatory sight of a child’s sandcastle.

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“My work is grounded in the position of questioning—or rather the questioning of position—in relation to frames and systems while acknowledging the inevitable necessity for frame and form to carry intent and meaning, to enable dialogue—ouroboros; the act of breaking myth being itself a form of myth-making.

My work as a whole is the form and process through and within which many of my inquires take, the oscillation between ideas and emotions, the investigation of our need to find meaning which leads to the theme of mythology and myth-making, itself another kind of frame and form which shapes and molds our perceptions of the world.”

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