Reed van Brunschot: THE NEW FAMILIAR

Make Room is pleased to present The New Familiar, an offsite exhibition with artist Reed van Brunschot, installed in a bedroom of a private residential apartment in downtown Los Angeles. It is on view June 1st, 2018 to June 11th, 2018. The private opening reception is 6 - 9 pm on Friday, June 1st, 2018.

A rental apartment is a transitional space occupied by people and their memories. The ephemerality is due to the fact that it facilitates the movement of come and go, present and vacant.

The exhibition spans across the bedroom with an elevated wooden floor installation; a wall sculpture of a spinning ceiling fan affixed to a thick, popcorn-painted panel (reminiscent of a typical apartment ceiling), and a video projection, all of which resemble visual elements of the apartments the artist used to live in. A looping video of her breast dripping milk is projected on the wall to the left of the space. The idea for this body of work was formed during the artist’s pregnancy with her son. During this time, due to health conditions, the artist was “stuck in a new apartment for months, often bedridden and staring at a spinning fan and popcorn ceiling.” The immersive sculptural floor installation is made of vinyl wood planks installed on air mattresses, which move and undulate when walked on. Viewers are invited into an intimate space where they are confronted with the explicit imagery of a dripping breast. The woman in the video is both anonymous and personal, thus asking viewers to consider the politics of motherhood, their relationships to objects, and their engagement with visual elements of everyday life.

Reed van Brunschot is a Peruvian-Dutch American Visual Artist who works with mixed media, sculpture, performance, installations, paintings, and video art. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and is currently completing her Masters of Fine Art at the University of Southern California. She has exhibited in the Netherlands, Brazil, and in the United States.

Her artwork takes on feelings of displacement and daily life through ‘transitional moments,’ ones in which a given situation can suddenly change - be it in form or sentiment. By building relationships between unexpected elements, through materialization or correlation to the viewer, there is an emphasis on a dialogue between man and the absurd object. Speaking in quotidian symbolism, her practice is based on themes of childhood, home life, and all things ephemeral.