The closing party for “A Tender Limb” will be held on Saturday, Feb. 24, from 8 to 10 p.m. at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, 2680 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles.
The group exhibition of works by Los Angeles-based artists Ibuki Kuramochi, Marley White, and Allison Arkush includes prints and a sculptural video installation by Kuramochi; mixed-technique and metal sculptures by White and, mixed-media and ceramic pieces by Arkush, who will give a poetry reading performance at the party.
Made with clogged drains, broken legs, earthen strands, muddy bows, scraped elbows, tiled feet, drooling lips, and unflushed fish, the viscerally integrated works are tethered between virtual and raw-material mediums as each artist uniquely performs the spaces and times their bodies (of work) take up. Strung out along the limits of familiar objects and ordinary encounters, the works collectively but independently unfurl tendrilled connections between subversive forms of intimacy, physicality, memory, affinity, and economy.
Recontextualizing “everyday” interactions with items, furnitures, images, screens, trinkets, skins, figments, tangles, tools, morsels and other abeyant entities that congeal or contract as soon as someone looks (away), the exhibition asks how bodies make room for objects through desire and affection — through taste. But it also asks how conditioned desires, affections, and tastes for objects make-room for (specific types of) bodies. When desire is reduced to metaphors of dis/taste, eating, and consumption, are exchanges with art objects molded in terms of the entrailed insides and outsides of a body’s relation to digestible — bite-sized — edible matter?
Recording or uncutting umbilical ties within and between any single piece, the artworks demonstrate alternatives to devouring the object (eating the other). Against this consumerist construction of desire, a different kind of bodily exchange occurs through liminal, limbinal works with tender, tendered extremities: jutting, tying, leaking, sagging. No inners and no outers, no subjects and no objects, no heres and no theres…. It is difficult to say where one work begins and the other ends…. Only a tenderness, a vulnerability, remains….
But this is not a tenderness that yields or gives way. This tendered tendril tenderness reaches, extends, and seeks out, sorely exposing itself to every risk in order to make-contact with an other. To find you.
Gallery’s website: www.reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com
Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome.
Since 2016, she has studied the uniquely Japanese modern/contemporary dance butoh from Yoshito Ohno at the world-renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi visualizes her performances and body movements as two-dimensional works and video works, exploring the poetic choreographic physicality of butoh dance and the human body in anatomy.
Kuramochi’s artistic practice incorporates butoh dance, performance, video, installation, and painting, and is deeply rooted in the body, the resonance of thought and body, metamorphosis and post-human feminism.
In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year on the front cover of L.A. Weekly’s special issue “People 2019.” Recent exhibitions include work at the Torrance Art Museum, New York Hall of Science, Spring Break Art Show LA, Craiova Art Museum Romania, and artist lectures at the art college in Tokyo and the NY Film Academy.
Artist’s website: www.ibuki-kuramochi.com