Clunie Reid, The Banality of Over-Determination..., 2008, photograph and ink. Courtesy the artist and MOT International.
A cumulative lists of all artists and projects involved in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty presents sixty projects by emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland over six months from 5 May to 2 November 2008.
Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty are under thirty-five, few of them have had significant commercial exposure, and in most cases this is their first opportunity to mount a solo project in a major public space.
The season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multifaceted portrait of the emerging art scene in the two countries, and to provide a space for exchange.
The Nought to Sixty programme consists of:
Events happen at the ICA every Monday night:
Sign up for regular updates about the Nought to Sixty and the rest of the ICA's programme, special events and offers. It's free.
Nought to Sixty is supported by:
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Clunie Reid uses cheap material and gaffer tape to create aggressive and rampant photo-collages.
Clunie Reid's work was in the Upper Gallery from Monday 2 June to Monday 9 June.
Clunie Reid (born Pembury, 1971, lives in London) creates aggressive and rampant photo-collages that question the media they are created from, as well as the integrity of the source images which they employ. The artist uses deliberately cheap material, gaffer-taping her collages to the wall and emphasising the act of composition rather than the final product. In one group of works Reid takes photographs of her studio floor; in others airbrushed images of beautiful women are broken into fragments, scribbled over and adorned with slogans that resound with irony.
Reid's Beautiful (2008) shows a majorette, her facial features pixelated. The original poster was found and photographed by the artist in Venice, already defaced with blue biro scribbled over the figure's eyes, nose and mouth. On her legs appear jagged scrawls of pubic hair. The dancer is superimposed over a postcard picture of a Venice sunset, and across the top of the image Reid has written 'beautiful' in childlike lettering. These are the clichés that form one idea of beauty: flat-chested girls in glittery tops performing arabesques, tourist sites at sunset with Prosecco at the ready. Bringing together these overloaded signifiers of beauty compounds the indeterminacy of the original image - and especially of the woman's identity. This message is further complicated in the artist's messy but carefully accomplished installation, in which the work must be seen as one of many conflicting and competing images.
In her work for Nought to Sixty, however, Reid moves away from paper collage to create more sculptural juxtapositions, affixing different images and media fragments onto industrial foam board. In the same way that the artist uses standard paper sizes, here she uses generic wire picture hangers to suspend the collages, undermining their potential commodity status but also co-opting the same industrial standardisation that she critiques.
While Reid's debased, deskilled aesthetic challenges the ideologies that her source images support, it also enables a mode of performance: the quickness of execution reflecting the swiftness of thought, as well as its potential for change. Misspellings are left in place, or simply blacked out, as the artist carries on. If impermanence is one of the qualities of the fashion and celebrity economy, Reid performs this flux in her foam board collages, sites where information is exchanged and updated. The strength of Reid's works is not manifested in any single piece but in the multifarious accumulation of meaning, quickly tacked to the gallery wall.
Melissa Gronlund
Nought to Sixty in pictures: Clunie Reid
Why an institution of contemporary art(s) like this, and not any other?
Artist-led organisations that support networks of emerging art in England outside London.
Photos of the projects, artists and audiences taking part in Nought to Sixty.
Nought to Sixty includes a series of monthly discussions that address the networks that form and contribute to an emerging scene.