#9: Reynold Reynolds

In works involving installation and documentation, Reynold Reynolds creates images of disintegration, consumption, and de-composition. A cycle of disintegration also becomes visible in the intimate portraits in Six Apartments. On a split screen, using primarily horizontal and vertical tracking shots as well as stills, the film feels its way through six apartments, providing insight into the everyday lives of their inhabitants. In the process, one half of an image is continually cross-faded by a new image detail and the gaze is led, by means of alternating the audio focus, from the left to the right setting and back so that a narrative structure is created. Having withdrawn into the privacy of their own homes, the isolated inhabitants experience a stunted emotional void, attempting to cope with it through pathological compensatory acts and an omnipresent, constant stream of media. Without reacting, they accept the news from the world outside and its pessimistic prognoses for the future: global warming, disease, and dwindling resources; parallel to this, the viewer experiences how the predictions about developments on earth are prototypically fulfilled in the microcosms of the apartments and domestic biotopes. Decline comes dangerously close to man – here, at least, he could have intervened. It becomes clear, as it were, that he himself also cannot escape his biological determinism.

Reynold Reynolds shows:

Six Apartments, 2007, 12:30 min
Secret Life, 2008, 10:00 min
Secret Machine, 2009, 14:00 min
Last Day of the Republic, 2009, 8:00 min
work in progress, 2009, 4x 3:00 min, first release

 

Reynold Reynolds (b. 1966 in Central, Alaska) currently lives and works in Berlin. During his undergraduate schooling at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Reynolds studied Physics receiving a Bachelor’s degree under the professorship of Carl Wieman (Physics Nobel Laureate 2001). Changing his focus to studio art he remained two more years in Boulder to study under experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. After moving to New York City Reynolds completed an M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts.

Reynold Reynolds is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has been awarded both the Rome Prize (2013) and the Berlin prize (2004). His work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and has been shown in numerous biennales including the 4th Berlin Biennale and the 3rd Moscow Biennale. He was the 2014-15 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan. His short film The Drowning Room was awarded an Honorable Mention at the Sundance Film Festival.

Influenced early on by philosophy and science, and working primarily with 16mm as an art medium, he has developed a film grammar based on transformation, consumption and decay. Detailed evolving symbols and allusive references create a powerful pictorial language based on Reynolds’ analytical point of view. His depiction of people often makes us aware of the small frames we use to understand reality. By subtly altering the regular conditions of life and watching their effects, he transfers the experimental methods of science to filmmaking, where he frames reality in his laboratory and changes one variable at a time to reveal an underlying causality.

In 2004 Reynolds was invited to the American Academy in Berlin with a studio at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien for one year. In 2008 he received support from the German Kunstfonds to develop two projects in Berlin. He has received numerous awards for his film work, including the Festival Award for Secret Life at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrueck, 2008, the 2009 Distinction Award for Six Apartments at Transmediale Berlin.

Reynold Reynold’s web site: www.artstudioreynolds.com