Biography
The contingency of normality is the focus of Reed’s artistic and textual practice. Normality can only be apprehended as a given reality through social consensus, and this consensus is inherently plastic, malleable. The play with the plasticity (potential) of the normal, both conceptually and materially, constitutes the foundation of her practice.
Reed’s (often) obsessive works examine the organization of the social through common devices (currency, forms, flags, confetti, elections). Through images, drawings and installations, the modalities of being-together are dissected and reconstructed into a clinical/poetical assemblages. Repetitiously hand-made, mimicking machine-like or digital labour, the works embody an imperfect precision, and illogical logic. Her writings are akin to negative space in relation to her works – all that is cut away, carved and sanded off in order to affirm a form, yet that which is separate from the form itself.
Patricia Reed (1977, Ottawa) obtained her BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, and an MA in communications from the European Graduate School, Switzerland. She has been a grant recipient from the Canada Council of the Arts, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (Germany); CCA Kitakyushu (Japan); Foundation and Centre for Contemporary Art Prague, (Czech Rep.); The Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada); and the CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw (Poland).
Selected recent exhibitions: Program, Berlin (2011); Württembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2010); Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm (2010); Limerick Art Gallery, Ireland (2010); Audain Gallery, Vancouver (2010); 0047 Project Space, Oslo (2010); Plateforme, Paris (2010); Galerie Sans Nom, Canada (2010).
Selected recent publications include: Eccentric Space (Utrecht: Expodium, 2011); Architectural Space as Agent (Vancouver: Fillip, 2011); Testify: The Consequences of Architecture (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2011); Choreo-graphies of Round and Round Revolution (Oslo: 0047 Publishers, 2011); Ten Theses on Publicity and Art (Toronto, 2010); The Politics of I Can… (Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 2010); and From Culpability to Capacity (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2010); Improper Human-ness (Toronto: YYZ, 2010).
Recent public lectures: On Artistic Labour, Free University Warsaw (2011); Artist’s Presentation, AIR Laboratory, Warsaw (2011); Public Art Presentation, Architecture students / University of Bangkok (in Berlin, 2011); Becoming Lives of Diwaniyah, The Winter School Middle East, Kuwait (2011); On Capacities, Eindhoven (2010); Artist’s Presentation, University of Waterloo (in Berlin, 2010); Artist’s Presentation, University of Exeter (in Berlin, 2008-9); and Dissensual Collaboration, University of Delaware (2009).
Patricia Reed lives and works in Berlin.