Tyson Reeder at Daniel Reich

Milwaukee's art museum has expanded, the university is hiring and, judging by the new work (2003-04) of resident Tyson Reeder, its skies are filled with the sounds of birds, children, and shimmering fragments of color and line. In one touching cityscape, Milwaukee, an open fire hydrant, its water diverted by a boy in a feathered headdress and jeans, sprays out the name of the city in pointillist dots. The liquid banner recalls flourishes in the work of Florine Stettheimer. Reeder's images--mostly works on paper, often mounted on canvas, with gouache, pen, pencil, modeling paste, dyes and low-budget accessories including rhinestones, feathers and nail polish--share Stettheimer's pleasure in decoration and knack for inflecting irrepressibly whimsical subjects with moments of true esthetic surprise and solemn, even somber, content.

Reeder's style is impatient and eclectic. Space is filled with washes that threaten to lose their integrity, pen and pencil lines that provide only cursory definitions of forms (sometimes the neck of a bird or the tumbling leg of a child, other times beer and garbage) and rambling doodles. Yet the work also acknowledges the history of urban imagery. Like some reincarnated, relocated Impressionist, Reeder shifts deftly between fashion and industry, urban change and popular entertainment. Bus Stop and City Face are agile studies of city types complete with yellow sneakers and green hair, while Purple Landfill presents two childlike songbirds sending musical notes into the violet sky as factories puff smoke clouds over a mountainous purple dump.

Milwaukee Apartments demonstrates Reeder's willingness to explore darker moods. Brackish-looking grids defining the architecture are dotted with colored rectangles reminiscent of the tenement laundry lines in early 20th-century Ashcan cityscapes and, like them, speak of the human presence in the inorganic terrain. Here and in Milwaukee, deeply colored buildings swallow light, reflecting murky tones of black and brown that appear to harbor a certain ambivalence toward city life. Even an otherwise bucolic view of birds by a river, Cranes, includes the gruesome surprise of an elegant wash of red layered into the blue of the water and seeming to issue from the bleeding body of a recently captured fish. Likewise, the pink, baby blue and mint green accents of Alpine Village or the violet of Purple Landfill introduce a triviality that troubles the atmosphere of pleasure pervading the rest of the show.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group