On display from January 31-Febuary 28, 2013, Seton Gallery:
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| Honoré Daumier, Detail of Les Baigneurs (The Bathers), 1840, Lithograph |
For Reed, his shop is a collaborative space for both national and regional artists.
He first established his business in San Francisco, California in 1976 and moved to Bridgeport in 1979. Around that same time, he began actively collecting prints. Reed bases his business model after the European workshop guilds from the Middle Ages, where numbers of assistants, students, and apprentices worked together to produce pieces in the master’s name. However, there is more of an exchange between himself and the printmakers he serves. “When you're in the print shop with Jim, he makes you feel like you're in your own studio and facilitates every possible requirement, even ones you didn't know you needed,” says Perry Obee, artist and assistant to Reed. Assistants have access to Reed’s presses and materials in exchange for helping him print his own work or that of other artists who seek out his services. When a print is made, Reed retains a copy of it. In doing so, he collects impressions from his fellow artists and assistants, sustaining a tradition of shared ideas and techniques. “Collaborating with Jim gives printmaking the same allure as painting or sculpture. He shares intimate knowledge of the process with his artists, tuning them into the subtle relationships between plate, ink, and paper,” says Ronnie Rysz, artist and assistant to Reed. After leafing through drawer after drawer with James Reed and his assistant Andy Murdoch, both of whose works are included in the exhibit, I immediately became transfixed by hundreds of eyes staring back from different eras. Each print depicts subjects either looking away, directly at the observer, or interacting with each other. The feeling of gazing into the eyes of old souls that peer back and acknowledge the viewer is arresting. Twentieth-century French psychoanalyst and philosopher, Jacques Lacan, coined the term gaze. The word describes the state of anxiety or self-consciousness that one feels at the discovery of being viewed as an object. One can recall instances of staring at others or being gawked at, remembering the old adage, a picture is worth a thousand words.
While some of the prints in The Gazers are so detailed that you’d swear you were looking at an old photoetching, all the works explore the content and hand of master etchers and lithographers. From Goya to Picasso, to the work of Reed and his assistants, the exhibition gives the viewer glimpses from Romanticism into the Modern and Contemporary eras. Each print illustrates a perspective determined by each artist’s eye and personal philosophy. A range of emotion is elicited in each beholder; whether the works recall delight or dread, one feels a sense of voyeurism and intrigue. It is clear that James Reed regards his collection as resources for generations to come.
-----Laura Marsh, Curator and Director-----
James Reed is trained as a curator/conservator at the Achenbach Collection in San Francisco and was a curatorial intern for the permanent print collection at San Francisco State University.Mr. Reed is presently the Manager and Curator of the Gabor Peterdi Permanent Print Collection at Silvermine Art Center. At present he holds in his own private collection of around 1,000 museum quality prints ranging from Durer to Dine. He studied at the University of Missouri, Kansas City; San Francisco State University; Tamarind Institute; and the University of New Mexico. Reed has received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and a Rockefeller Research Grant. Selected solo exhibitions include Institute Technilogico, Monterey, Mex.; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and participation in more than 100 group exhibitions throughout the United States, Latin America,and France.
Contact: Laura Marsh, Director lmarsh@newhaven.edu 203.931.6065
