Semipermeable

An image list is available here.

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Semipermeable describes a barrier or membrane that is partially, but not freely or wholly permeable. Our urban environment is full of fences and windows, gates and grids – semipermeable membranes between the worlds of the public and private that are at once open and closed. These works probe the experience of looking at and seeing through by focusing on the barrier instead of the view. Reid’s artistic practice is a meditation on the punctuated moments in our daily lives where the mundane and the sublime overlap. Drawing on a set of shared visual references, her work echoes the urban and industrial landscape’s familiar patterns, utilitarian designs and vernacular materials. Her work represents the everyday world as both ubiquitous and intimate, and seeks to inhabit what Bill Viola calls “the border zone between the conscious and the unconscious, where the lines between reality and imagination, between object and association blur.”

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Thea Reid is a Canadian artist whose work spans printmaking, drawing and sculpture. She received a BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax (2013), NS and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI (2016). Reid is an artist, curator and educator who taught printmaking and drawing at Saginaw Valley State University, Oakland Community College, and Detroit Community College. In 2019 she co-founded the White Brick Gallery in Ferndale, Michigan with Jessica Hayworth, a one-year curatorial project featuring emerging and early-career artists. Reid has exhibited work across Canada and the US, including the Art Gallery of Mississauga, the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, the Kaiser Gallery in Cleveland, and the Neighbors Gallery in Ithaca. Her work is a meditation on perception and sensory experience, on moments where the transcendent and the everyday environment merge.

Thea Reid gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Canada Council for the Arts.