On Friday, April 10th at 4pm (MDT) Nüart Gallery hosted a virtual Zoom artist talk with Randall Reid to celebrate the opening of his exhibition, Times Forgotten. This video is a walkthrough of the exhibition including a recording of Randall Reid from the virtual talk.
Randall Reid builds sculptural wall constructions of aged wood, metal, and repurposed found objects including vintage signs, antique farm equipment, and other utilitarian ephemera. His steel-framed compositions are made of materials from the past, but his novel arrangements and abstract patterns feel distinctly contemporary. In Randall Reid’s new exhibition, Times Forgotten, historical materials are both preserved and forever changed. The artist recontextualizes antique tools, toys, furniture, and panels by abbreviating, rearranging, and then framing them in fresh new compositions. The resulting vignettes seem to be both rooted in and removed from time with a nearly recognizable specificity that often leaves the viewer searching their memory for the context of the components.
“I change the history… alter the path of the materials,” says Reid. In his work the function of the original object and also the meaning of the object is transformed. Table legs might become stripes in a 2-D minimalist composition, for example… though however altered and metamorphosed the finished pieces may be, they always manage to retain a resonance of the age and era of their previous incarnations.
Reid was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1956. He has participated in over 300 exhibitions and is represented in numerous private and public collections including: The American Embassy, Kuwait, The Arkansas Art Center, The Austin Museum of Art, The Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, The Masur Museum and The Muscarelle Museum of Fine Arts (College of William and Mary). He currently resides in San Marcos, Texas where he has been a Professor of Art and Design at Texas State University San Marcos for over three decades.
