Tristan Reed

Curatorial Rationale

I wanted to try and portray the different ways in which the strange and unconventional exist in my mind and in other people’s lives. The works of Nobuyoshi Araki and Louise Bourgeois have been some of my most prominent inspirations on my work. I have always been fascinated by things such as fashion, art and literature that would be considered “strange” by others. With this series I intended to expand my methods of artistic expression along with showing different themes of the unconventional - whether they are more modern or come from decades ago. Also, many of my general art ideas and thoughts are expressed in this series.

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My first piece, a large-scale portrait called Bowie, is meant to express how David Bowie used many of the unusual and weird elements that were popular from the 70’s to the 80’s, most prominently. I also wanted to push my artistic skills much further in the scope of realism, more than what I am used to, mostly because of the scale and style that I was working with, which was a 24x36 board working in the realistic style. I have also made several smaller sets of self portraits in a much looser and more graphic style, in order to give a more overall theme to the large portrait as well as pushing my artistic limits. I wanted to demonstrate some more artistic elements of form, line and contour in order to make the portraits realistic, but still containing that graphic style and emotion. Another one of my other inspirations for my series has been the artist Hirohiko Araki. He is a well known artist in Japan as his most popular work is his current-running book series called Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. His use of line work, ink and general composition have had great influence on my personal works and my expression of self. In the piece, Jojo, I directly take panels and snippets from Araki’s work and compile them into this 18x20 illustration board, partly to express my interests and influence that Araki has had on my work in the past and partly today. 

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I think that the strongest parts of my works are the variety that they all contain, but are still able to retain a similar theme. My intent was to explore more styles of art such as realism, abstract, and graphic while containing this core idea of the strange and unconventional. Whether it comes to the medium used, the subject matter, the meaning behind the work, each piece is again unified by this theme.

The overall vision that I have for presenting my body of work is that I want the viewer to feel as though they are in an underground and grungy space, similar to a red room or underground subway station. I want the viewer to feel comfortable with the red lights that will wrap around the exhibit with all of my works exhibited on the graffitied walls.