Further information

Kieren Reed’s sculpture explores the dialogue between function and display, between the mass-produced and the artist’s inimitable skill of making. Using traditional craft techniques, Reed painstakingly replicates large-scale commonplace functional structures (such as a tourist information kiosk, or an Irish seafaring boat) and then re-positions them out in the world as sites for engagement and discourse.

With the installation, ‘why can’t you go back home forever and let me be’, (2007) Reed has hand-fabricated a perfect pastiche of a 1960s recording booth. Although identical in design and structure, the original purpose is denied as the interior of the stall remains empty except for a mirror reflecting back at the viewer. Set within the frame of the gallery space and dislocated from its intended function, the booth exists somewhere between formalism and representation: on the one hand it stands as a beautifully crafted Minimalist sculpture whose material character can be admired for its own intrinsic value, while at the same time it operates as a nostalgic replica of a by-gone age endowed with a complex matrix of human resonance.

To further accentuate this dichotomy, Reed surrounds the booth with drawings that detail the process of making as well as related artifacts and documentary ephemera displayed in immaculate vitrines. This includes original blank vinyl discs and recordings made in similar booths over the last 50 years as well as documentation drawn from Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock and Jean-Luc Goddard’s film Masculine Feminine that both feature recording booths within their narratives. By mimicking methods of museum display, Reed elevates their status as objects for visual scrutiny whilst stifling their intended sensory roles – that of listening, watching and reading.

Excert from Ritter Zamet press release, 2007