Halsey McKay is proud to present What Color is the Sacred? a solo show of new sculpture by Megan Reed. The exhibition draws its title from anthropologist Michael Taussig’s ethnography of color from Western and Non-Western viewpoints. Taussig explores how color in various cultures is associated with the foreign, the feminine, the childish; how it can be deemed frivolous while simultaneously be supremely powerful. Reed deems color as inherently political and potent, interested in it as a vernacular through which to claim space and with which to explore formal relationships.
Megan Reed creates pieces from the detritus of single-use culture by forming discardable packaging into tangible, present day, absurdist relics or contemporary figures. She begins by cutting or using existing shapes from materials at hand, often styrofoam, cardboard or plywood, through a process of drawing and collage. These shapes are then fused together with hydrocal creating a kind of permanence: an individualized, unique handmade object from mass produced materials. For Reed, the plaster places them in the vernacular of ancient and modern architecture and monuments. Referencing stone circles, the colors of urban architecture, Cyclopean rock formations, and cairns, her work represents sites of community, feats of human engineering, and places for leaving marks.
Reed has a background in theater and sees her groups of sculptures as characters of sorts. Arranged on one large plinth, the installation invites the viewer into the room as a kind of performer/participant on the same stage. The works’ chromatic surfaces come with a serious request: that play can be political and transformational, both radical and community-generating.
Megan Reed is an artist in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in Painting from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA, where she was the recipient of the Graduate Painting Teaching Fellowship and the Rex Ray Material Support Award. She also holds an MA from Southern Illinois University and a BFA from New York University. She has taught at California College of the Arts, Diablo Valley College and Southern Illinois University. She has been an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared twice in New American Paintings, in the San Francisco Chronicle, in solo shows in London, UK, Berkeley, CA and in numerous group shows nationally. She was recently an artist-in-residence at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, where she created an installation as part of the campus’s permanent art collection.
