Patricia Reed

b. 1977, Canada

‘Aesthetic management’ is the term I have adopted to describe my artistic practice, encompassing visual, textual, design, curatorial and performative modes of production. Using various devices of formal articulation, I can better respond to the specific conditions and concepts of my research interests. My work addresses the structures of cohabitation – the ways in which we co-ordinate and manage ourselves into collective bodies, and the ways in which subjectivity is organised.

I’m interested in the notion of the abnormal body, the foreign form or the spectral (ideological) character that upsets the co-ordinates of the habitual. Playing with various formal devices, the aesthetics of disagreement are a key conceptual force driving my practice, where I work towards a sensibility of the uncanny, where the ‘ordinary’ is interrupted, and, in its altered form, renders visible the processes inherent to normalisation and the behaviours that go ‘without-saying’. I’m interested in the zones of indistinction, where systems of discourse overlap and converge in a yet-to-be-named territory, and how the aesthetic realm can make such reconfigurations appear in the world(s).

(Text: e v+ a – matters catalogue, 2010)