The Unreal by SK Reed is an exercise in being unrecognizable and a practice of possibility. Reed’s ceramic wall pieces are reflections on species encountered during walks in the shrinking Kansas Prairie, a space which provides great relief and inspiration from their everyday anxieties. For the artists, the difficulty and strength of their Queerness is the struggle to be easily named. Not at home in the gender binary, they often feel they are living between dueling realities. In researching the prairie, the artists has become familiar with the wildly diverse prairie landscapes, dreams and fantasy take over, opening a place of possibility which expands their understanding of reality.
In Undoing Gender, Judith Butler explains that fantasy and reality are not always the inverse of each other. Butler writes:
Fantasy is not the opposite of reality; it is what reality forecloses, and, as a result, it defines the limits of reality, constituting it as its constitutive outside. The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home. (39)
In The Unreal, Reed’s ceramic abstractions rooted in beloved local ecosystems embrace imagination. In one work, a creature which is part bird, part moth is seen in flight on the wall. Another piece showcases the leaves and petals of a Compass Plant, rearranged into something reminiscent of a sun or face. These woodfired works are installed on slip painted walls, utilizing the same clay used in sculptures. Reed creates an ephemeral installation imitating beams of light which radiate from behind each piece, connecting them to each other and welcoming the viewers into this strange world. Inspired by their ecological counterparts, Reed imagines the “otherwise” and in turn challenges suggestions of the unreal within themselves.
SK REED: ARTISTS TO WATCH (KC STUDIO MAGAZINE)
Press Release: Oct-Nov 2024
