Kristin Reed

Biography

Kristin Reed is a Brooklyn-based artist who has been creating abstract paintings and collages since 2009. She currently has a studio residency in Chashama’s program A Space to Create at The Brooklyn Army Terminal.

After an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1982 Reed's was known for activist street art in the 80s-90s including stencils, bus posters, street posters, artist books, community murals, and billboards as well as studio drawings and paintings often with environmental and socio-political themes.

In 1989 Reed was included in a collection called Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women curated by Judy K. Collischan Van Wagner. She was then part of an exhibition entitled The Realm of the Coin: Money in Contemporary Art curated by Barbara Coller for The Hofstra Museum on Long Island in 1991. The show was then picked up by The Smithsonian Museum’s SITE program, traveling to major museums around the US from 1992–1995, including The Queens Museum of Art in New York City. A street billboard on The Lower East Side was recreated for The SOHO DIA Foundation’s exhibit of Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here: Homelessness and Other Venues. The catalog of the exhibition led to being invited to recreate the piece for Not Yet: On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism curated in 2015 by Jorge Ribalta at The Reina Sofia Cultural Center in Madrid, Spain, and in Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery in Chelsea, NYC for Rosler’s 2016 If You Can’t Afford to Live Here M-O-O-OVE and If You Lived Here Still: Housing is a Human Right curated by Yoko Ott at The New Foundation in Seattle, WA in 2016.

Since beginning a meditation and Reiki practice in 2005 Reed’s work made a turn toward the abstract and spiritual. More recently images have started making their way back into the work through collage, reconnecting it to earlier activist work with themes of ecology, climate change, and the extinction of species.

Artist statement

Overwhelmed by the vast data bombardment of contemporary life, through my work I'm trying to make sense of all this input by looking for meaning and trying to find a centralizing organizing principle that can help me understand the world and feel safe and whole. The idea that there is intelligence and architecture to the physical world that is reflected in consciousness and symbolized in geometry that connects all things inspires my work. I'm fascinated by how the farthest reaches of distant galaxies and the tiniest particles and waves of the natural world mirror each other and are distilled by science into mathematics and a geometry that reveals spirit.

With expressionistic marks, luminous color, violently splattered, dripped, and softly sprayed paint, and collaged flotsam & jetsam of fractured media images and text, I am balancing the carefully drawn sacred geometries of circles on interconnecting panels. With this, I intend to show a universal intelligence and the timeless connection of all beings. The message is woven in a cohesive whole of separate parts, sometimes feeling disconnected but on a more distant plane, all look toward the unity of all things.

Layered dimensions reveal physics, archeology, culture, mysticism, meditation, and dream space more real than anything in our physical world. Through this art-making process, I have come to recognize an inner reality within a very large cosmic reality. An exploration of consciousness in the very tiniest particles and the unimaginably immense universes is how I seek balance and serenity within the wild and chaotic state of our contemporary existence.