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Staff Artist Profile - Reed Fahnestock - Residency Manager 
We live in a post-modern world characterized by fragmentation and interconnectivity. It is a world where the “prevalent narrative identity thesis, which insists that our identity is a function of the story that we construct about ourselves,”* is reflected in the words of high government officials who declare that there is no need to be troubled with facts because, “a judicious study of discernable reality [is] not the way the world really works anymore…we make our own reality.”§ Torture is no longer “torture”, but “enhanced interrogation”; Kidnapping is no longer “kidnapping”, but “extreme rendition”. If life can now be described as a series of interconnected personal fictions where the individual defines reality, then art should reflect the fictitious nature of reality if it is to be considered representative of its place in human history as well as retain relevance in the context of the present. This post-modern attitude is reflected in my work. 
While I have three distinct bodies of work, they all address these issues, as well as comment on the question of “art v. craft” that has preoccupied this profession for the past several decades. All three bodies incorporate elements derived from mass-produced consumer items that have been materially transformed through the symbolic ceramic process. The figurative imagery employs the idea of personal transformation through the acquisition and assimilation of external power and the interconnectivity of the ‘hive-mentality’ the solitary, ‘separateness’ of the individual in contrast to the implied, yet absent, multitude. The slip-cast vessel work has all of the same elements and attendant connotations as the figurative work. While more historically referential in its obvious allusion to the ‘ceramic vessel’, the components are reconfigured (“re-purposed”) thereby setting the individual elements into new relationships. The concept of craft is closely linked to the idea of the vessel, and so craft is a very important part of the dialogue in this work. While the forms are clean, and the individual elements simple, and they evoke a sense of almost careless whimsy, there resides in these vessels a virtually unseen degree of perfection of craft and extreme attention to detail, that, for the average viewer, imparts a feeling of slick, commercially produced ware, with its allusions to industry. 
The jug is a quintessential pottery form, tracing its history
back thousands of years to some of the first vessels ever made
for the transportation and storage of liquids. This work elevates
the ‘lowly’ jug, with its references to illicit activity, to vessels
of more established stature. * Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation, James L. Battersby, The Ohio University, 2006 (Narrative 14.1 [2006] 27-44) § New York Times Book Review, 17 September 2006, p10 |