Clunie Reid, Life as you like it

25.Aug.07 - 29.Sep.07
Fri-Sun 12-5 or by appt

Mot
Unit 54 Regent Studios 8 Andrews Rd
London E8 4QN
07931 305 104 / 020 7923 9561
info@motinternational.org
www.motinternational.org
Tube Bethnal Green; BR Cambridge Heath, Hackney / Bethnal Green

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.