article In conversation
with Bryan Reedy
In conversation
with Bryan Reedy
In conversation with Bryan Reedy about
scale, childhood and the geography of memory.
scale, childhood and the geography of memory.
In conversation with Bryan Reedy about
scale, childhood and the geography of memory.
Bryan Reedy is a London-based artist who spent his childhood in towns across South Africa before relocating as a teenager to the west coast of the US. In 2005 he moved to New York City where he studied architecture at The Cooper Union before completing his BFA at Hunter College in 2016. Bryan went on to study painting at Slade School of Fine Art in London where he completed his MFA in 2018. We recently met him in his south London studio to learn more about his practice.
Artiq What first drew you to painting? Why?
Bryan I tend to think of my practice in broader terms; the work of being in the world with a sense of diligent curiosity. The things that come out of that living often feel like by-products of the practice, rather than the point of it. Sometimes those things are paintings, or close enough approximations that they can occupy the space a painting would. And a painting can be so magical — a distortion of perception brought about by the simplest materials, by colour spread on a piece of fabric. The ability of a painting to intimate a realm with a scale and dimensionality at odds with the space it exists in is endlessly fascinating to me.
Bryan I tend to think of my practice in broader terms; the work of being in the world with a sense of diligent curiosity. The things that come out of that living often feel like by-products of the practice, rather than the point of it. Sometimes those things are paintings, or close enough approximations that they can occupy the space a painting would. And a painting can be so magical — a distortion of perception brought about by the simplest materials, by colour spread on a piece of fabric. The ability of a painting to intimate a realm with a scale and dimensionality at odds with the space it exists in is endlessly fascinating to me.
Artiq You have lived in different places across the world, including South Africa, New York and London. How have these places shaped your engagement with art? Is there a particular place which has inspired you the most?
Bryan I grew up in South Africa until the age of 14 and the memory of it underlies everything that has come after, even as it seems to exist on a different plane altogether. Perhaps that is how childhood is for everyone, but the geographical distance between the place of my childhood and the rest of my life has amplified the temporal disconnect of those memories and given them a weight they may not otherwise have had. My teenage years were spent in a small-town northwest of Seattle, and it couldn’t have been more different. It was green and damp and laid back in mood but held on to an idealistic and academic rigour rooted in the West Coast of the 60s and 70s. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City in the early 2000’s that I experienced some sense of place that tapped into my childhood memories of South Africa. There was a moment in my first few months of being there that through some strange shift in my perception I was transported to Johannesburg. I was crossing Houston Street on the East Side on a hot, dry, summer day when it happened. It only lasted an instant, but the feeling of that moment lingered for the entire decade I lived there, bound up in the way the heat of the summer filled the atmosphere, the scale of the roads, a certain way the dust and rubbish collected against the curbs or at the margins of the sidewalks. I have now lived in London nearly as long as I lived in New York City and I’ve come to appreciate it, but in a utilitarian way. The reminders of South Africa I find here are familiar for their role as colonial exports that defined the built environment of my childhood, and I find the city wholly lacking the heat parched sparseness that punctuates so much of the American landscape.
The most difficult part of moving as much as I have is a lack of continuity. Each of the places I’ve lived has influenced my engagement with art, but sequentially, with no reference back to the places that came before. As a result many of the places that inspire me most have been internalized, made part of a geography of memory that I visit both waking and asleep: my grandparents’ house in the Central Valley, California; the industrial neighbourhoods of North Brooklyn where I worked and wandered throughout my late 20s and early 30s; the many houses of my childhood; and strange dream amalgamations of them all that are as I knew them and also different.
Bryan I grew up in South Africa until the age of 14 and the memory of it underlies everything that has come after, even as it seems to exist on a different plane altogether. Perhaps that is how childhood is for everyone, but the geographical distance between the place of my childhood and the rest of my life has amplified the temporal disconnect of those memories and given them a weight they may not otherwise have had. My teenage years were spent in a small-town northwest of Seattle, and it couldn’t have been more different. It was green and damp and laid back in mood but held on to an idealistic and academic rigour rooted in the West Coast of the 60s and 70s. It wasn’t until I moved to New York City in the early 2000’s that I experienced some sense of place that tapped into my childhood memories of South Africa. There was a moment in my first few months of being there that through some strange shift in my perception I was transported to Johannesburg. I was crossing Houston Street on the East Side on a hot, dry, summer day when it happened. It only lasted an instant, but the feeling of that moment lingered for the entire decade I lived there, bound up in the way the heat of the summer filled the atmosphere, the scale of the roads, a certain way the dust and rubbish collected against the curbs or at the margins of the sidewalks. I have now lived in London nearly as long as I lived in New York City and I’ve come to appreciate it, but in a utilitarian way. The reminders of South Africa I find here are familiar for their role as colonial exports that defined the built environment of my childhood, and I find the city wholly lacking the heat parched sparseness that punctuates so much of the American landscape.
The most difficult part of moving as much as I have is a lack of continuity. Each of the places I’ve lived has influenced my engagement with art, but sequentially, with no reference back to the places that came before. As a result many of the places that inspire me most have been internalized, made part of a geography of memory that I visit both waking and asleep: my grandparents’ house in the Central Valley, California; the industrial neighbourhoods of North Brooklyn where I worked and wandered throughout my late 20s and early 30s; the many houses of my childhood; and strange dream amalgamations of them all that are as I knew them and also different.
Artiq In what ways has your practice developed since you first started painting?
Bryan I have been making art for the better part of 25 years at this point and I find myself thinking a lot about the vastness of the unmapped ontological space that each new piece implies — an ever-branching network of versions and variations that will never get made. Some days I wonder whether such conceptual debt is worth the making, other days it is enough to let my hands exercise their hard learned faculties and marvel at their dexterity. I'm not sure that this is a development or a regression, but it is where I find myself at this juncture in my practice.
Artiq You have recently started making smaller works with ink on paper. Could you elaborate on this process? What are your plans for these works moving forward?
Bryan These new works started as an antidote, in a way, to the larger works. I first saturate a sheet of paper with water, often to the point of pooling, and then work with a brush full of India ink. The result is as much a product of curating the way the sheet dries as it is putting the marks down. Making them is immediate in a way that the planning and execution of the larger works doesn’t allow. At the same time, I was looking for a way to destabilize the making of a mark or a composition that offered a similar mediation between concept and finished work that the scale of the large works provides. In such a small piece the act of making a mark takes almost no time, and the number of marks in a piece is limited so I find some mechanism of resistance is useful in confounding/complexifying each brush stroke.
Bryan I have been making art for the better part of 25 years at this point and I find myself thinking a lot about the vastness of the unmapped ontological space that each new piece implies — an ever-branching network of versions and variations that will never get made. Some days I wonder whether such conceptual debt is worth the making, other days it is enough to let my hands exercise their hard learned faculties and marvel at their dexterity. I'm not sure that this is a development or a regression, but it is where I find myself at this juncture in my practice.
Artiq You have recently started making smaller works with ink on paper. Could you elaborate on this process? What are your plans for these works moving forward?
Bryan These new works started as an antidote, in a way, to the larger works. I first saturate a sheet of paper with water, often to the point of pooling, and then work with a brush full of India ink. The result is as much a product of curating the way the sheet dries as it is putting the marks down. Making them is immediate in a way that the planning and execution of the larger works doesn’t allow. At the same time, I was looking for a way to destabilize the making of a mark or a composition that offered a similar mediation between concept and finished work that the scale of the large works provides. In such a small piece the act of making a mark takes almost no time, and the number of marks in a piece is limited so I find some mechanism of resistance is useful in confounding/complexifying each brush stroke.
Artiq Who has been your biggest influence within your artistic career?
Bryan My father. He was a painter and a ceramicist, a lecturer of art at the university level, and worked as a freelance designer and fabricator. Many of my childhood memories are of exhibition openings, or the various studios/workshops he worked in over the years. But growing up in that environment has come with complications as well as benefits. I see peers from non-art backgrounds making conscious decisions about how and why to be an artist that for me were answered unknowingly very early on. Coming from a creative background, even a very supportive one, requires a different sort of attention and in some cases unlearning.
Artiq You frequently work on large-scale canvases. How do you decide where to begin with these works? Can you discuss your experience working at this scale, as opposed to your smaller scale pieces?
Bryan The large collage-based works that represent the majority of my output over the last few years came out of a process of scaling up a series of very dense graphite drawings to be paintings. I was looking for a way to capture some of the material quality of the graphite, which is so particular on the page, but translated into a medium more at home on a large canvas. The solutions I found all ended up relying on the use of very traditional painting materials: linen, cotton, pigment, all bound with rabbit skin glue. This pleased me, and I find that new pieces in that body of work, even when conceived as larger works right from the outset, still rely on or embody that initial process of translation in some way.
Artiq Do you have any exciting ideas or projects coming up that you would like to share with us?
Bryan I have several projects in the works, some of them in the research stage, others starting to generate visible results. I am working on a collection of bas relief frames for the ink drawings mentioned earlier. These will be installed as polyptychs. I also have an ongoing series of material studies exploring different modes of cumulative or accretive growth which I hope to use in a new series of spatial works exploring the grotto as it relates to isolation and the spiritual body.
Bryan My father. He was a painter and a ceramicist, a lecturer of art at the university level, and worked as a freelance designer and fabricator. Many of my childhood memories are of exhibition openings, or the various studios/workshops he worked in over the years. But growing up in that environment has come with complications as well as benefits. I see peers from non-art backgrounds making conscious decisions about how and why to be an artist that for me were answered unknowingly very early on. Coming from a creative background, even a very supportive one, requires a different sort of attention and in some cases unlearning.
Artiq You frequently work on large-scale canvases. How do you decide where to begin with these works? Can you discuss your experience working at this scale, as opposed to your smaller scale pieces?
Bryan The large collage-based works that represent the majority of my output over the last few years came out of a process of scaling up a series of very dense graphite drawings to be paintings. I was looking for a way to capture some of the material quality of the graphite, which is so particular on the page, but translated into a medium more at home on a large canvas. The solutions I found all ended up relying on the use of very traditional painting materials: linen, cotton, pigment, all bound with rabbit skin glue. This pleased me, and I find that new pieces in that body of work, even when conceived as larger works right from the outset, still rely on or embody that initial process of translation in some way.
Artiq Do you have any exciting ideas or projects coming up that you would like to share with us?
Bryan I have several projects in the works, some of them in the research stage, others starting to generate visible results. I am working on a collection of bas relief frames for the ink drawings mentioned earlier. These will be installed as polyptychs. I also have an ongoing series of material studies exploring different modes of cumulative or accretive growth which I hope to use in a new series of spatial works exploring the grotto as it relates to isolation and the spiritual body.