Joanne Reid’s works employ various articles of daily use or industrial building materials, in this case paper bags, white tiles and neon tubes. She then builds these into installations based on freely associative allusions to archaic sacral spaces. That is, to a world radically different from that of the “white cube”, the setting of the art scene, with which they nevertheless share certain basic features that Reid explores. The medium at the very least played a completely different role, of symbolic expression, or even the explicit embodiment of eternal life and life after death. This work was inspired some time ago by the realization that the ancient Egyptian denomination for a sculptor meant “he who keeps alive”, which in her case denotes working with discarded “dead” objects. This is also true for two works she presents as interrelated, placed so as to form a certain hieratic composition. The first work with neon tubes evokes a sort of magic sign, of which an important feature is its title, Dead End. Two paper bags turned upside down and placed on a base of white ceramic tiles are reminiscent of a monument sculpted from stone.
