The Fight Between Carnival and the Quotidian
Full Installation View: 8m long (Click image for large view)
Panel 1
Each panel: 76 cm X 76 cm, 1025 pieces of confetti per panel
Panel 2
Panel 3
Panel 4
Panel 5
Panel 6
Panel 7
Panel 8
Panel 9
2009
One bag of hand sorted confetti (by colour) ordered in a Cartesian Grid.
Each Panel: 81 cm X 81 cm framed
Total pieces of confetti +9000
The Fight Between Carnival and the Quotidian takes its point of inspiration from Pieter Bruegel’s painting “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” (1559) where an abutment of social forces plays out in a market square between a convent and a bar/brothel. In the contemporary variant, confetti is deployed as the medium of collective bacchanal, yet a medium which has been perversely re-ordered and classified into a categorical formal system, denied of its inherent celebratory capacity. A tension ensues between the everyday taxonomies of bureaucratic structures and the chaotic plurality of things and peoples they seek to organize and (ac)count for.
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 [...]