Cassi stared intently at the mirror she liked the way she looked. She likes the way she feels, she likes the state she’s in. Pammy said she likes the attention, but Pammy is a 2bit slut, least that’s what the kids called her. Even Nichole had clapped (had clap) so hard that the nails had serrated the palm flesh, oozing red in the bright lights of the camera flash. Cassi had never noticed before now, how old Nichol’s hands looked, even when garnished with raw fish and diamonds, but they all said how beautiful she was. Pammy was just jealous, how dare she ruin such a perfect life, letting it all hang out for the whole world to see, toppling around to the Cha Cha Cha on nine inch spikes. She sighed and picked up a copy of Hello. Turning the pages, her face flushed. Oh my god! That evil little bitch Clunie had scrawled all over it. Just you wait.
MOT International is delighted to welcome back Clunie Reid for her second solo exhibition at the gallery. Reid will be showing a new series of individual wall based works that push the medium and scale of her previous small photo-collages and focus the mass information of her wall based installations while retaining their raw guttural and immediate appropriation of media images. These new works successfully enlarge and focus our gaze on the reversed spectacle of contemporary society, slipping it to us in the bite-sized snippets for our mediaholic minds to devour. Pages from hello, loaded, adverts from TV, images from the internet are re-photographed and printed on reflective surfaces. Broken cameras, disruptive flash glare and printing slippage are all appropriated to enhance the work. Reid’s venomous wit is hand written over these seductive surfaces, turning the language of spectacle in on itself, negating the stupidity, transforming the dumb into great profundity. Her materials mirror her subjects, the gloss and seductive surfaces combined with the trashy use of tape, stickers and marker pen, perfectly complement the celebrities, sneaker ads and out of focus environments. Clunie Reid tells it how it is, her work cuts through a global language and it is only a matter of time before she is recognised as one of the great new chroniclers of the 21st century.
Clunie Reid (born in 1971, Pembury, Kent) lives and works in London, UK and is represented by MOT International. She was selected for East International (2007) and received the John Jones Art on Paper Award 2008 for her work at Zoo Art Fair. She has recently participated in Nought to Sixty at the ICA and had solo exhibitions at MOT International, Focal Point Gallery in Southend and Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart. Her work has been included in a number of international exhibitions including We came here to get laid not critique dutch culture at Wilfried Lentz Gallery in Rotterdam, Aspen 11 at Neue Alte Brucke in Frankfurt, Local Operations at Serpentine Gallery in London, falkeandcharlotte project space/ Dolores at Ellen de Bruijne Gallery in Amsterdam, and This show is ribbed for her pleasure, Cynthia Broan Gallery, New York.Clunie Reid