RTS is excited to welcome our July/August artist in residence, Macon Reed!
Macon Reed is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, radio documentary, painting, and participatory projects. Her work has shown at venues including PULSE NYC Special Projects, BRIC Media Arts, ABC No Rio, The Kitchen, Art F City FAGallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, Roots & Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, ICA Baltimore, and Athens Museum of Queer Arts in Greece. Reed completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. Additionally she studied Radio Documentary at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Physical Theater at the Dah International School in Belgrade. Recently Reed was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a Research Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology, BRIC Workspace, and Abrons Art Center. She will be a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in the coming year in New York.
Reed’s works seeks to expand the agency of our collective imagination in response to the growing apathy and isolation inspired by late capitalism. She understands the imagination as an emotive, theoretical, and corporeal realm of transformation. Motivated by human relationships within evolving queer and intersectional feminist frameworks- her projects recognize that aesthetic form and social engagement are not mutually exclusive but rather, deeply intertwined. Reed’s work reflects on intersections of trauma and healing, sacrifice and transcendence, and what it means to belong. Responding to the gravity of these subjects, she activates humor, relationship, and pleasure in her process wherever possible. Most recently, her practice has evolved towards creating immersive sculptural environments that serve as public sites for dynamic inter-community conversation and transformative ritual. She understands her work as an act of creative resistance.
Image Info: Eulogy For The Dyke Bar (Exterior), 2015/2016