Clunie Reid: Life As You Like It

“Cats Bum Mouth”, “ What useful things did he teach you?”, “Deep Decline”, these are some of the words scrawled over photographs, culled from the pages of trash magazines that Clunie Reid seems to have amassed over the last few years. Images are ripped from their original context and re-appropriated. Over these images Reid adds text, hand written in marker and ballpoint pen, often taken from films, the adverts or intuitive responses by the artist to the content of the original. Like Richard Prince, Reid re-photographs images, but her stance is far from passive and she is very much rooted in the tradition initiated by Valie Export or Elaine Sturtevant. She drags the apologies for culture by the hair and shouts in their faces until they present us with their true identity.

She does to the pages of Hello what punk did to music and fashion, she holds up the banality and conformity of advertising and celebrity and shows the underlining aggression and sexuality hidden under the surface of these apparently subdued, but complicit images. Collaged elements, such as children’s stickers and masking tape hover above the surface. Raw paint and marker are used to censor irrelevance often decapitating or denying the gaze. From the popular cultural media designed to control and feed the aspirations of the masses Reid presents, “Life as you like it”.

In recent exhibitions at East International and Transmission Gallery Reid has made wall based installation works by blowing up her smaller studio photographs as large photocopies or inkjets and applying them directly to the wall with gaffer tape. These large-scale wall collages are site specific and impressively dominate these institutional spaces. For her exhibition at MOT Reid has chosen to show the original small photograph based works that inform these larger works. These are the raw hand made prototypes at the core of her practice, usually only ever seen on the walls of her studio.

Clunie Reid lives and works in London, UK and is represented by MOT International. Matthew Higgs and Marc Camille Chaimowicz selected her to participate in East International 2007, 14 July to 18 August, Norwich Gallery, Norwich and her work is to be included in a survey of contemporary photography by DuMont Literatur and Kunst Verlag published in August 2007. She had a recent solo exhibition at Keith Talent Gallery, London. Her work has been included in a number of international exhibitions including, Transmission Gallery, Glascow, “Aspen 11”, Neue Alte Brucke, Frankfurt, “falkeandcharlotte project space”/Dolores, Ellen de Bruijne Gallery, Amsterdam, “This show is ribbed for her pleasure”, Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York, “Les marveilles du monde”- Centre for Contemporary Art, Dunkerque, “Sir Reel”- Redux Gallery, London, “Not Everything”- Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London, “Platforme Primera”- Plate forme 4, Dunkerque, France and “Other than”- MOT, London.

Clunie Reid
Life As You Like It