Shelley Reed
Born 1958, New York, NY, lives and works in Boston, MA
Up a Tree (after Snyders), 2005, oil on canvas, 88” x 63”, Lent by the Artist, Courtesy Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, NY
During the reign of Postmodernism in the late twentieth century, many artists employed the aesthetic strategy of appropriation—the wholesale borrowing of images from art history or mass media—in order to create works of art that questioned notions of originality, creativity, and the value of fine art in a world beset by mechanically reproduced images. Shelley Reed also appropriates images, but for entirely different philosophical purposes.
Reed finds her source material in historically obscure paintings, primarily by European artists from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She scours art history texts and old exhibition catalogues to find paintings of animals that, after hundreds of years, continue to pack an emotional wallop. Then, she significantly alters the images in a number of ways: radically enlarging their size, changing details, tweaking compositions, excising irrelevant passages, and draining away color to a palette of black, white, and grays. These changes are made to forefront and intensify the emotional content of the images. Scenes of animals in conflict, wrought large, serve as allegories for a host of issues relevant to contemporary society, and include the nature of violence, life and death, tame versus wild, power and control, and the confrontations of nature and culture. Reed’s work celebrates the enduring psychological power of imagery—especially animal imagery—across time, space, and cultures.
