Monograph offering a collective literary and poetic rendering of Alan Reid's works.
Warm Equations is a monograph that's not a monograph: a study of an unstable, mercurial subject. Taking the paintings of New York-based Alan Reid as a cypher, the book pivots around the artist's deferral of authorial closure, shifting the emphasis from his work to a multiplicity of voices and contributors. Rushing in from offstage, these voices pronounce their own concerns, setting textual tempos and rhythms that run amok non-hierarchically, catching on to or installing their own ambient metaphors.
Set among Reid's images, each text constitutes a voice within a splintered chorus. The dramaturgical chorus, traditionally united in its simultaneous interventions, here operates on discrete registers. The ideal audience, the self-same guide, the judge and jury of ever evolving ethical ploys, the personification of narrative, the analyst, a reminder of social imperative, a road to the gods… The chorus shares in the action, but only by marking its enunciation as interlude, as arbitrated pause. Warm Equations assembles such interludes, recasting the figure of the protagonist as always already necessarily multiple. Imagine you and I, Reid and reader, nymph and faun, our prowling halt and frozen. The chorus overtakes the theater.
Published following the exhibition “In Heat,” Lisa Cooley, New York, in May 2016.
Alan Reid (born 1976 in Texas, lives and works in New York) holds degrees from the University of North Texas and the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent solo exhibitions include “An Absent Monument” at Mary Mary, Glasgow; Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad; Lisa Cooley, New York; and A Palazzo, Brescia. He curated the exhibition “Air de Pied-à-terre” for Lisa Cooley gallery in January 2013. His work is in the permanent collection of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Reid was included in the second edition of Phaidon's Vitamin D.
Edited by Rachel Valinsky.
Texts by Matthew Brannon, Corina Copp, Jill Gasparina, Kristen Kosmas, Ella Kruglyanskaya, Alan Reid, Lisa Robertson, Chris Sharp, Rachel Valinsky, Jamieson Webster.
