Shelley Reed (LA)

"Digesting Shelley Reed’s paintings felt a lot like discovering that tick on the back of your leg hours after a jaunt through the woods. With the utmost conviction, the tick quietly clung to its chosen host, fastened itself within the layers of fleshy epidermis, and fed until its swollen body pulsed with excess. Fortunately, Reed’s paintings do not carry Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain spotted fever. However, they infect the viewer with something much more revealing of its source and equally uncomfortable to contract. Contextualized by the looming crescendo of the information age, Reed’s exhibited work at the Fitchburg Art Museum begged the question: are curiosity and paranoia two sides of the same coin?"

"Artist Shelley Reed excerpts small details from Old Master paintings, expanding and re-contextualizing them in her often large-scale black and white paintings. On a recent sunny morning in Brooklyn, Amy Rahn spoke with the artist about the origins and intentions behind her work, the time-traveling potential of representation, and her current exhibition at Sears-Peyton Gallery."

"“I spend a lot of time in libraries looking at old art books,” admits the artist. “Right now I’m looking at painters from the late 1600s, who are documenting life around them.” Reed takes inspiration from that time period by appropriating images from those paintings and recombining them in an effort to connect to a contemporary audience the way that artists like De Hondecoeter and Snyders spoke to theirs."