Jamie Reid - Time For Magic

Time For Magic

Jamie Reid

21st June - 6th July

Public opening Summer Solstice

21st June 3pm - 7pm 

Isis Gallery at Regency Town House, Brighton

Isis Gallery is very pleased and proud to present at the Regency Town House in Brighton a new installation of work by the world renowned British artist Jamie Reid (b.Croydon, 1947). Time For Magic features ritualistic hangings and objects arranged around a tipi - a shelter, a community space, a condensed Temporary Autonomous Zone. Within the tipi sits the Eight Fold Year book, an instruction manual and guide to the mysterium. Including work from the late 80’s to the present, Time For Magic sits within a sequence of installations by Reid that combine the old and the new, ignoring the rules of ‘market’ and the need for fresh product. Certain totemic hangings - including Universal Majesty Verity Love Infinite (1989, acrylic on unstretched canvas, 234 x 237 cm) - have been used both in rituals and exhibitions, attesting to their power and gaining energy as they accumulate age.

PRE-HISTORY TOMORROW

Central to the installation however are the function and tools of cleansing and nurturing rituals that refer both to Reid’s work with the Visual Stress performative art group based in Liverpool in the 90’s and the development of Brunswick Square itself, much of which was funded from plantation profits and compensation following the abolishment of slavery (Visual Stress performed vimbuza rituals around Liverpool to counter the negative energies accumulated through historical and geographic connections with the slave trade). Time For Magic also features work on slate, glass receivers and a number of loosely painted canvases that are the product of more automatic processes, trans-temporal geographies and altered states, reminding us that visions are indeed everywhere.

UNIVERSAL MAJESTY VERITY LOVE INFINITE

Reid continues to champion the people, the 99%. Recent work in support of the Occupy movement, the Free Pussy Riot campaign and now the anti-fracking movement has built on a reputation strengthened in the 90’s with his allegiance to the Reclaim The Streets and Anti-Criminal Justice Bill campaigns. We are at an astonishing moment in the history of Capitalism when not only the people but the economists sense that something has to give. It is time for change. TIME FOR MAGIC!

DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE

Jamie Reid’s longstanding practice as an artist sits firmly within a tradition of English radical dissent that would include, for example, William Blake, Wat Tyler and Gerrard Winstanley. The work of dissent must offer, out of necessity, other social and spiritual models and Reid’s practice is no exception.
Although Reid is known primarily for the deployment of Situationist strategies in his iconic work for the Sex Pistols and Suburban Press, the manifold strands of his art continue that work whilst showing us other ways in which we can mobilise our energy and spirituality. It is this dialectic between gnosticism and dissent that lies at the heart of Reid’s practice and makes him one of the great English iconoclastic artists.
Ragged Kingdom: The Incomplete Works of Jamie Reid at Galleria Civica di Modena September 12th 2014 - January 6th 2015

For more information and press requests please contact John Marchant at
john@isisgallery.org or (44) 07906275098
Isis Gallery at Regency Town House, 13 Brunswick Square, Brighton BN3 1EH

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