Detroit, MI – Reyes Projectsis pleased to announce KUDDELMUDDEL, a two-person exhibition by Michelle Segre and Scott Reeder, opening on Friday, September 28from 6-8 PM. Both artists employ a style of art making that seams together the audacious, and unnatural while examining today’s unavoidable material culture.
Michelle Segre’s assemblages—at turns amoebic and totemic—elevate everyday sweepings to a thoughtfully mapped aesthetic plane. Within an armature of bent wire and brightly colored yarn, the artist places found and handmade matter, revealing them to be of both singular origin and enmeshed within the larger, almost biological systems of consumerism and capitalism. Blurring the lines between the home grown and the manufactured, objects such as carrots, mushrooms, fan blades, and saws force the viewer to reconsider environmental boundaries.
These freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures, while reveling in a contemporary disarray, are in tight dialogue with disparate sculptural practices over the past century: Louise Bourgeois, Isamu Noguchi, Joan Miró. They grapple with issues of permanence and temporality; of the plinth—mediating the transition between object and site. In their boisterous colors and forms, their raw, unpolished finishes act as both fly catchers and dream catchers.
Simultaneously, Detroit-native Scott Reeder will present two bodies of playfully subversive paintings that provide a graphic counterpoint to Segre’s visceral works. Reeder’s “List Paintings” explore an absurd or irreverent topic through a handwritten list of different ideas and potentials. Playing on the self-seriousness of conceptual art, these paintings index popular culture in all its weirdness and beauty.
A second series of paintings brings together two of Reeder’s previous motifs. With his “Landlord Paintings”, the artist mimics minimalist painting by using a commercial roller to hastily lay down swaths of color, much as a landlord would when sprucing up a rental apartment. On top of these grounds, he paints over a scattered layer of found material, such as pasta and pennies. The result is a diffused, all-over composition that cannily replaces the painterly gesture with the industrially derived outline of consumer culture.
ABOUT MICHELLE SEGRE
Michelle Segre lives and works in New York City. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, The University of the Arts, Philadelphia PA and The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga TN. In 2017 her work was included in exhibitions at The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, Ceysson and Benetiere, Luxembourg as well as others. She is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York. Segre is a past recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.
ABOUT SCOTT REEDER
Scott Reeder is an artist whose work has been exhibited widely including solo shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, L.A.C.E., Los Angeles, Gavin Brown’s enterprise, NY, Kavi Gupta, Berlin, 356 Mission, Los Angeles, and Pat Hearn Gallery, NY. Reeder is best known for his irreverent take on modernism and memorable titles like Money in Bed and Symmetrical Pirate.
In addition to his artistic practice, Reeder has an active curatorial practice with his brother Tyson Reeder and wife Elysia Borowy-Reeder. The collaboration began in 2002 with the opening of their storefront gallery in Milwaukee, “General Store.” General Store went on to curate the legendary “Drunk vs. Stoned” exhibitions at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, as well as the “Early Show” at White Columns in New York. Their most recent project “Club Nutz, “the world’s smallest comedy club,’” was a special project at Frieze Art Fair in London in and has been featured at the MCA, Chicago, Salon 94 NY and the ICA, Philadelphia. Reeder is also a member of Milwaukee International, a five-person collective responsible for the “Milwaukee International Art Fair”, and the “Dark Fair” at the Swiss Institute, NY and the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne.
Reeder’s paintings and projects have been reviewed in Artforum, Art & Text, Art Review, FlashArt, Frieze, The New York Times, Art News, Art In America, TimeOut, The Village Voice and The New Yorker.
Reeder’s other recent projects include running a tiny performance venue; Club Nutz—the world’s smallest comedy club, and recently completing a feature length film titled Moon Dust. Set 100 years in the future, Moon Dust tells the absurd and sometimes heartbreaking story of a failing resort on the moon. Moon Dust has screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archive, NY, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and is scheduled to screen at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway in 2018. It will be screened at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark in September 2018.
He will open a solo show at CANADA NYC in Spring 2019.