A jokester by nature, Scott Reeder has been exhibited widely, yet he’s still relatively unknown. He brings the full range of his talents to his first show with Lisa Cooley, his sixth New York solo overall. While his previous works have parodied modern art, political ideologies and national identities, these efforts concentrate on delivering his deadpan sense of humor straight up.
The show is dominated by compositions created by spray painting over pasta laid temporarily on canvas—like the largest work, which features the outlines of alphabet-soup letters scattered across a black background. Another group employs uncooked linguine to spell out four-letter words in pairs, such as iffy idol and sexy wind. Most of these stick to monochrome fields, though a few flirt psychedelically with rainbow colors. Elsewhere, Reeder uses pasta for allover abstractions, as well as chalk on chalkboard paint to replicate lists taken from his notebooks.
Spray-painted aluminum sculptures resembling crumpled balls of paper tossed on the floor, plus the artist’s phone number writ large in
neon, round out a dynamic debut with his new gallery.—Paul Laster