Randall Reid
Coast Line
Steel, Wood, Paint
15.25 x 13.5 x 2 inches
Nüart Gallery presents, Past and Present, a solo exhibition of new mixed media work by the artist Randall Reid. The exhibition will run April 5th through April 21st, with an opening reception on Friday, April 5th, from 5:00 - 7:00 pm. Please join us for hors d'oeuvres and live music. An artist talk will directly precede the opening at 4:00 pm.
Known for his potent re-mixing and re-contextualizing of found and historic materials, Randall Reid engineers salvaged steel and wood into sensuous formal color compositions. Reid’s steel-framed objet trouvé are reclaimed from other eras and through the artist’s care and craftsmanship are granted the gravity and dignity of artifacts. Highly charged, tactile windows into the recent industrial past, some of Reid’s materials date back to the 1800s, some to the 1970s, and every era in-between. All have a palpable sense of history. There is a balance and harmony to Reid’s work that make the compositions at once contemporary and timeless-- formal yet in possession of an effortless-seeming organic unity.
Randall Reid’s latest body of work, Past and Present, is forged of materials and impressions of eras past. With his refined understanding of form and content, and working with the skill of both an artist and craftsman, Reid redirects fragments of collected historical material such as signage, wood, and steel. Working with remnants of functional ephemera including cold war era panels, Victorian instruments, printmaking tools, and bits of structures that could be barns or boathouses— for example— Reid creates vignettes freed from their original context, but full of reminiscence. His pieces surface dormant memories and bring fresh life with new meaning to conceptions of the past.
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.
