Commission: Clunie Reid

Clunie Reid (born Pembury, 1971, lives in London) creates work that exposes and interrogates an acutely contemporary perception of images. Her collages, texts, installations and, most recently, animations often take their source material from contemporary culture manifest in magazines, tabloids and the internet. But rather than serving as a critique of celebrity, Reid’s practice seeks to expose the viewer’s own demands upon the image, and show how this desirous gaze has colonised a multiplicity of images and formats.

For the MAP Commission, Reid has developed a sequence of images that have been appropriated, degraded, or manipulated. Her photographic spreads do not necessarily provide clear entry points of access or breakdown, but rather Reid proposes this simultaneity of images so as a challenge to the viewer. And while the magazine loops images back into their source format, the barrage of sexualised content embodies pornographic gaze. Digital effects—such as repeating pinkish lens flares—hint at a surreal or mesmerizing experience of the eye as it consumes the image, but they also betray the artist’s intervention and thus her presence as both maker and witness of this scenario.

Clunie Reid, October, MOT International, 10 October-7 November; John Jones at Zoo, 16–19 October, London; KARAOKE LIKE, Fotomuseum, Winterthur, 24 October 2009–7 February 2010; Newspeak, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 24 October–17 January 2010 The artist appears courtesy MOT International