Having worked with some of the most iconic and influential figures in American popular culture in the last 25 years, few artists could claim greater influence than REISIG AND TAYLOR in the evolution of the photograph as the cornerstone of Pop Art. From rock album covers to portraits of hip-hop artists, REISIG AND TAYLOR have developed a tremendous oeuvre reflective of their scope, intensity, and skill as both artists and photographers. With the unique capacity to interrogate and breakdown the normative barriers between intimacy and estrangement, anonymity and celebrity, sexuality and conviviality, the force of the aperture as a way of cutting-through such dualistic entanglements emerges as the central strand carried throughout their body of work. Whether photographing a celebrity like Tupac Shakur or a personal family friend, REISIG AND TAYLOR always maintain a certain tension between the world as it is seen and the world as it is lived—an aesthetic demand to see the world as we live it, rather than to live it as we see it. 

[Artist’s Statement] 

Since its irruptive emergence in the ‘50s, Pop Art has sustained an intoxicating aesthetic force and an obsessive cultural compulsion across the material and theoretical dimensions of contemporary artistic production. Continually transgressing the historical limits of taste and consistently redefining the traditional conceptions of the art object, Pop Art seems to insist on a disorientation of the positioning of high and low, object and artwork, repetition and difference, reality and surreality. In other words, as an aesthetic mode or art form that interrogates the time and space of art in itself, Pop Art works to blur the habitual distinctions between the mundane reproducibility of images in mass culture and the striking singularity of the work of art. But what is it, exactly, that insists on this disorientation in Pop Art? And what is the disruptive, intoxicating force through which the elements of Pop are maintained and transformed in the technological contexts of the contemporary world? It is this critical line of questioning which is explored through the aperture of REISIG AND TAYLOR’S collection, Pop (3D) Lenticular (2016-17); incorporating images of Pop icons such as Marilyn Monroe, Mona Lisa and Mugshots, this photographic assemblage transpires through a multiplicity of cultural figures and aesthetic forces dancing between stillness and movement, serenity and chaos, familiarity and unknowing. Awakened and vivified through the technology of lenticular (3D) photography, each piece literally pops in a momentary paroxysm as it convulses between audience and artwork—realizing a psycho-visual choreography performed between body and image as they simultaneously dissolve and congeal in the effervescent materiality of the work. By splicing together, interweaving, and overlaying various photographs, images, and designs, the pieces collected in this series unleash a radical artistic potentiality as they inaugurate an experimental form of Pop Art that is narcissistically self-obsessed with interrogating the life-force or vitality of the Pop image in itself.  It is as if these prints themselves instantiate and represent the joie de vivre of the photographic event—opening and closing, dilating and constricting… a hallucinogenic, virtuosic, blending of medium and matter. REISIG AND TAYLOR’S Pop (3D) Lenticular shows us what it looks like when Pop Art sees itself in the mirror, looking at itself in the lens.