Trajector Diesel Commission - Angie Reed

The international fashion brand Diesel supports creative talents in numerous ways, almost too many to mention. For a start there’s the ITS (International Talent Support) annual competition for fashion students, now in its sixth year, held in the Italian seaside city of Trieste. ITS has rapidly grown into one of the most important international platforms for young fashion talent. Diesel is a funding sponsor of the event, and the Diesel Award winner designs a capsule collection to be sold in Diesel stores worldwide.

Similarly, budding music talent can take part in DIESEL-U-MUSIC, an international search for unsigned artists also now in its sixth edition, created to provide an alternative path to the increasingly corporate music industry.
In the art field there are a range of opportunities, including projects such as DIESEL WALL, which challenges contemporary artists to decorate blank city centre walls, bringing artistic expression and vibrancy to the streets. Another initiative is DIESEL NEW ART – an online gallery and creative competition designed to support up-and-coming artists....

Thus, it is entirely within this tradition that DIESEL FRAGRANCE for TRAJECTOR is a new path in brand talent support, offering an opportunity for an emergent contemporary artist whose own artistic sensibility corresponds with the special programmes and thematic strands of the Trajector Art Fair to be commissioned to produce a new work to be premiered at Trajector Art Fair.

The Trajector Diesel Commission is pleased to invite Angie Reed as the commissioned artist for Trajector Art Fair 2010 in recognition of her avant-garde multi-disciplinary approach in works that combine colour, sound, form, performance and animation in a way that the selectors recognise to be in keeping with a contemporary cultural zeitgeist.

Angie Reed is an American/Italian artist who lives and works in Berlin. In addition to her career as a visual artist, she is a well-known ‘underground’ electro-pop artist. After completing initial art studies in Italy, she attended post-graduate studies in Berlin under the legendary Katharina Sieverding, a strong advocate of her quirky and humorous post-feminist oeuvre.  Since settling in Berlin upon completion of her studies and speaking fluent German, her acting career has gained ground in Germany in radio, television, film and theatre, including for prestigious companies such as Berlin Volksbühne.

Angie Reed’s art works usually combine a number of elements: installation sculpture consisting of found and produced objects; animation made from manipulated traditional drawings and self-composed music giving a strong sound and/or narrative element to the work.

A current strand of work combines her own particular feminist view with appropriating classic ‘underground’ culture (such as Kenneth Anger’s ‘Scorpio Rising’) and re-realising it using her own quirky style combing low-tech animation and blue-screen technology. Reed is busy constructing a body of works that draws upon Arte Povera, Italian 1960’s design and illustration/animation culture.

Within her bright, modular sculpture installation, video, cosmetics and craft objects –such as jewellery she has designed in collaboration with cult German jewellery designer Oliver Pfeiffer- will take on the form of clues found in fantasy films or video games (which often feature ancient civilisations or esoterica in their narratives) and translate them from two-dimensional screen depictions to a kind of three-dimensional landscape in which the viewer must piece together the clues played out in fantastic landscapes or stage sets.

In addition to showing this new commission, Angie Reed – together with Mark Stewart- will be running the installation/performance ‘In Bed With My Anger’ in one of the hotel rooms of Hotel Bloom! over the duration of Trajector Art Fair & ‘Taut’.

On the evening of Saturday 24 April 2010, she will perform live at the party being programmed by Trajector in collaboration with Art Brussels at Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels.

Angie Reed has shown in a range of institutions including KunstWerke (Berlin), KunstBank (Berlin) Wolfsburg Museum (Wolfsburg). MAMA/Boijman's van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Stedelijk Museum and Centre for Fine Arts (s-Hertogenbosch), Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien (Berlin) and Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati). Her work was also shown at the 2008 biennial Festival of Architecture (London) and at the 2004 Berlin Biennale, KunstWerke.
Angie Reed has produced two albums on Chicks on Speed Records and a range of other releases on various labels. As a musician, she has produced soundtracks for theatre and film and performed internationally, including at critically acclaimed festivals such as the Ether Festival/Royal Festival Hall (London) and Ladyfest (Oslo).
She has appeared as an actress in a number of German films and stage productions.
She is represented by Vegas Gallery, London.