Laurie Reid at Mills College Art Museum
Art in America, Nov, 2004 by Melissa E. Feldman

Laurie Reid makes watercolors, but this Berkley-based artist's choice of mediums is not obvious at first glance. We tend to think of watercolors as being small, representational and colorful, but Reid's are big--up to 10 by 7 feet--abstract and gray. As evidenced by this show of seven works made between 1996 and 2003, she uses watercolors to explore the workings of chance and the poetics of space.

Bigger Than You (1997), the simplest piece in the show, consists of two half-moons whose rounded sides face each other across a gulf of paper. The semicircles were made with a sweep of watercolor consisting of Reid's usual diluted mix of red, yellow and blue--a blend that resolves as gray. Yet patches of pigment that tend to collect where the water pools wind up giving contour and a sense of volume to the otherwise pale spheres.

Many of the works similarly evoke natural phenomena and feature pairs of forms in opposition. In one, a web of cauliflower- or brain-like florets proliferates from the middle of the paper like butterfly wings. Another work resembles a traditional Chinese landscape with a moon hovering over a craggy mountain. In Softening Wall (1999), a pair of large drawings installed in a corner at right angles to each other, a wobbly grid occupies the upper and lower thirds of the sheets, while the untouched middle space flows between them. It reminded me of an illustration of some cellular function.

Her methods are various and subtle. In Cosmic Cat Toy (2004), the smallest and only colorful piece here, a cluster of pink, yellow, red and purple dots swings from calligraphic strands. Elsewhere, watercolor unaccountably takes on the precision of ink drawing; lines go from vivid to ghostlike as the pigment runs out and is replenished. Up close, you find color inhabiting the darker areas. From afar, her watercolors, whose paper buckles between shadowy marks, could pass for embossed prints.

Often, the compositions in Reid's watercolors seem to result more from physical process than formal intent; she lets gravity and other properties of the medium play a major role. In this way, she arrives at a relaxed, organic interpretation of Minimalist form.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

Bibliography for "Laurie Reid at Mills College Art Museum"
Melissa E. Feldman "Laurie Reid at Mills College Art Museum". Art in America. Nov 2004. FindArticles.com. 23 Sep. 2006.

 

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