In “Full Home” three latest our bodies of sculptural and photographic work – What Grows (2022), Landings (2022)and Clementine (2022–3— discover ecology and techniques of manufacturing, teasing out the tensions between constructed nature, excessive expertise and the impression of post-industrial human exercise. These works are offered at Mai 36 Galerie alongside an intervention within the gallery house of wall work derived from vernacular Swiss Appenzell illustrations.
Reus’ follow usually addresses present widespread objects and techniques, combining industrial and craft supplies and processes to create a compelling open-ended symbolism and visible language that’s without delay indirect and effusive. In Clementine, outsized protect jars protrude from the partitions, exposing shiny, resinous contents resembling thick, synthetic jams by way of their clear forged partitions. Different examples function extra opaque, cussed stone-like and chalky skins. The jam jar right here is launched as each a vessel of containment and a register of time. By recalling the sluggish means of preserving and fermentation, the Clementine works level to the strain between natural perishability and the economic impulse to increase and manipulate pure life cycles.
These sculptural containers’ lids and sides are inscribed with a myriad of non-public notations, label-like graphics and home graffiti, blurring the boundary between mass-produced items and individualized rituals of preservation. As repurposed containers, and thru their inflated scale, they set up a mode of unconventional portraiture. Newly reinvented by the prompt proprietor, they reveal potential for an exploration of extra private re-translations and narratives.
In Reus’ work, the bodily transformation and show—usually of vessels or receivers of helpful motion – units the stage for objects to shed their operate and enact a unique picture of themselves. In her photographic sequence titledLandings, Reus turns to the journey of fruit and the assemble of the standard still-life as a metaphor for up to date meals logistics and environmental shifts. Pictures of particular person fruits in excessive close-up, are discovered amid container-strewn home building particles, framed onto powder coated panels in muted hues of beige and cream. These panels, which incorporate fragments of a childhood drawing by the artist, create a layered meditation on time – juxtaposing a previous, idealized imaginative and prescient of nature with the realities of a globalized extremely constructed meals business.
As Reus says, “I really like the concept that we’re in a position to mirror feeling or tone by way of materials decisions. When abstractions corresponding to color or type merge, they’re afforded the magical capability to speak content material.” Reus’ deft skill to tweak and manipulate frameworks provides her a palette of various resonances of which means that may floor or be intentionally pushed to the aspect. By way of her meticulous sculptural interventions and photographic juxtapositions, Reus reveals produce as a web site of contradiction: nourishing but industrialized, natural but sculpted by capital and science, intimate but globally displaced.
Every body within the Landings seriesbears on its aspect a quantity indicating the space the fruit has traveled – 9335 km for the blackberry in Landings (9335, Slopes) – highlighting the immense distances that seasonal produce now routinely traverses. Because the local weather shifts, the excellence between what’s native and what’s displaced turns into more and more blurred, elevating questions on what’s misplaced when meals is uprooted and reformulated to suit industrial calls for.
In What Grows (Reduce Stems) agricultural instruments are remodeled into sculptural hybrids for measurement and containment. Inflexible sacks rendered in sand are etched with protruding graphics and industrial imagery of powdered potato, highlighting the distinction between nourishment and industrial processing and referencing a globalized meals economic system the place natural matter is repeatedly decreased, substituted, and reformulated, evermore artificial and alienated from its origin. The tape measure – a logo of standardization – is rendered in warped, reclining type, stripped of its supposed goal. It now not serves as an instrument of management and measure however as an alternative takes on a extra animated, natural pose, suggesting an alternate, unquantifiable relationship between meals, consumption, and the human physique.
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Throughout these three our bodies of labor proven in “Full Home”, Reus interrogates the invisible infrastructures that form our each day consumption. In doing so, she invitations us to rethink the hidden techniques that govern not solely what we eat but in addition how we perceive time, private reminiscence, and the way we repeatedly re-think and form our relationship to the pure world.
at Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich
till Might 31, 2025
