The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present The Great Lumbering an installation of works constructed on-site by Maeghan Reid during a three-week residency at the gallery. With an undeniable reverence to that which cannot be placed, Reid assembles a temporary mausoleum for the uncanny, literally the un-home-ly. Place, as her intuitively built structures implicate, is simply a myth constructed from scraps collected while en route. For Reid, it is the formless that carries the burden of form.

Discarded wood from surrounding construction sites, strips of fabric remaining from desired pieces cut away, squares of prefabricated flooring seemingly functionless on their own all find their way to one another without predilection, a manner which highlights Reid’s rigor in navigating the contours of the unstructured. Her work initiates moments of construction that place the viewer actively within and symbolically without a determined form. The images sporadically recaptured from the pages of library books with a phone’s camera mark this precarious place with a nomadic iconography that continuously eludes itself.

All in all the installation agitates the collective conscience and challenges the unspoken societal structure by flipping established levels of division on their side. The horizontal totem that frames The Great Lumbering, circling the walls of the gallery, collapses all desires and ability to imagine a free standing object existing purely as is; it beseeches us, rather, to consider the weight of all that is gathered yet unassimilated.

Maeghan Reid, born in California in 1980, currently lives and works in Berlin. The Great Lumbering is Reid’s first solo exhibition in New York. Her work has been shown both internationally and within the United States at Thomas Brambilla Gallery (Bergamo, Italy), China Art Objects (Los Angeles), numerous galleries in Berlin, and an upcoming solo exhibition at Heppenheim Kunstverein (Germany).

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