These Are Not Fables by Macon Reed

Macon Reed’s new psychedelic installation contends with our contemporary pandemic experience through the long lens of history.
 
Tinworks Art is pleased to announce These Are Not Fables, an original commission from artist Macon Reed that offers a series of altars for reflection on a variety of pandemic themes and our experience in the larger context of plagues across human history. 
 
Reed’s ambitious handmade installation, These are Not Fables asks how our understanding of this past year serves as a conduit between our past and future. Inside the 32-foot long structure Reed has constructed a series of six altars, each focusing on an aspect of experiencing a pandemic. From the bubonic plague of the middle ages to the 1918 influenza epidemic and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s, Reed draws parallels to our most recent encounter with a little understood virus. Esoteric coping strategies, tools for single people longing for touch, DIY medical technologies, and an urgent grappling with mortality connect us to our predecessors’ struggles to understand and bear witness to an incomprehensible toll taken by a tiny powerful force.

Reed frequently creates interactive environments – like Eulogy for the Dyke Bar (2015-2020) and A Pressing Conference (2017- 2019)  –  that act as spaces for gathering and remembrance. Her current work is focused on creating rituals to help us mourn and to internalize the lessons of this supposedly ‘unprecedented’ time. These are Not Fables culminates with a rotating Tower card, one of the major arcana of the Tarot. Depending on its position – upright or reversed – the Tower card can suggest calamity or a new beginning. Reed presents the spinning card, suspended over two chalices, less as a tool of divination than as two paths unfolding before the visitor who must choose which direction to take.

 
Reed’s new piece will be exhibited as part of the Tinworks Art summer exhibition, “The Pursuit of Happiness,” July 29 – Sept 5, 2021 at the Story Mill in Bozeman Montana. “Reed’s installation is exemplary of our current artistic moment, poised somewhere at the crossroads of social practice and the physically distanced present. It looks back bittersweetly at the dream of relational art as pure conviviality or connectivity.” Co-curator Melissa Ragain said. “These Are Not Fables is a gallery of solitude, a catalog of the ways we make meaning when we’re grasping at straws.”

 
Macon Reed is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, radio documentary, painting, and participatory projects. This is her first exhibition in Montana.  
 
For more information, visit www.tinworksart.org.