ABOUT
These paintings are a key part of the cyclical nature of Megan Reed’s practice: beginning, often, with a very loose, playful, collage-like approach of found materials (styrofoam, wood, cardboard) with which she intuitively creates sculptures out of what might otherwise be discarded in a kind of consumerist response and a desire for permanence. These works range in scale from 10 inches to ten feet and often take on unintentional anthropomorphic references and presences, balanced on stands inspired by paper dolls. Making sculpture appeals as both a material challenge (what can literally bind these materials and make them stand up), an ongoing exercise of what color can do in space, and a theatrical one (what do these objects do both together and with other bodies when navigated). They become, quite literally, bodies in space (a guiding definition for me of what sculpture is), occupying three dimensions in a sort of performance with whomever interacts with them in context. Adding color/paint activates these forms; the color becomes the character/personality of the pieces, paintings I see as brought to three-dimensional life, walking off the wall and often asserting themselves very loudly.
Because her practice began and is rooted in painting, when Reed completes a series of sculptures, she returns to painting to both study and memorialize the works just completed—creating "portraits" of these absurdist forms feels soothing, exciting and a way to see what she did with color in that context. Flattening these works back to the two dimensional plane also "activates" these bodies in a different kind of context, Reed gets to literally create the stage and play with their interaction using new choices around the background color and in relationship to the rectangle; this is then extended when installed together into again, an almost theatrical experience. This current series has her also playing with scale - many of the paintings parallel the large scale of some the sculptures, while others she’s scaled up from their diminutive actual sizes into much larger ones (see Vizard as an example, it was originally an 11" sculpture, now portrayed in a 60x60" painting). These become post-sculptural sketches for the next works; she can see Vizard now becoming large-scaled versions in sculptural form, a body returned back to space, only gigantic in size now. And the cycle goes on.
These particular paintings and sculptures are in active conversation with Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett, from 1921, in which mechanized bodies wearing sculptural costumes dance on stages of vibrantly chromatic hues, seemingly contextless, yet referencing the act of making, being, performing in an increasingly industrialized world. Reed also thinks a lot about other painters (and there are many) who have delved into set design and costumes: particularly Picasso's costumes for the Ballets Russes's Paradein 1917 and David Hockney's many sets. She likes to think of painters who think a lot about drawing extended into interactive sculpture as a kind of performative set, like Jean Dubuffet and Franz West and people who think about painting on the 3-D plane and sculpture on the 2-D, often together, including Niki de Saint Phalle, Mary Heilmann, Betty Woodman, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Ruby Neri. And of course straight up painter/color lovers like Stanley Whitney, Marina Adams, Milton Avery. Megan Reed thinks a lot about megalithic stone circles and natural rock formations like those nearby her in Joshua Tree. They all seem ripe for performance, for mark-making (and leave traces of these), sites where people can gather and feel free to dance, to paint, to sing or to just hang out - bodies in space.
Reed earned her MFA in Painting from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA, where she was the recipient of the Graduate Painting Teaching Fellowship and the Rex Ray Material Support Award. She also holds an MA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from New York University. She has taught at California College of the Arts, Diablo Valley College and Southern Illinois University. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at MASS MoCA, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center and at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, where she created an installation as part of the campus's permanent art collection. Her work has appeared twice in New American Paintings, in Vogue Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has been included in group shows at Harper's Los Angeles, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, MASS Moca, and Johansson Projects, among others. Her most recent solo show was held at Halsey McKay Gallery, in East Hampton, NY
