Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk
Solo Exhibition by Saun Santipreecha
Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA
July 1 - 29, 2023
Welcome to another L.A. Art Documents' video. This time we are presenting the debut solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based Thai artist Saun Santipreecha titled "Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk" at the Reisig and Taylor Contemporary.
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….
Saun Santipreecha is a multidisciplinary artist from Thailand who works in both visual and sound/music art. His artistic route in both disciplines began simultaneously, studying privately with two Thai Silpathorn Award recipients for Thai contemporary artists, visual artist Chalermchai Kositpipat and classical pianist/composer Nat Yontararak amongst other tutors and mentors. In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles where he pursued a career working in music composition for film and collaborating with artists from multiple disciplines including fashion and video games while also creating solo music/sound projects including the recent Dandelye, before returning to visual art in 2022. His compositional work in film, TV, and fashion has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as in New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has also worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski. He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.
For more info visit www.reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com