SK Reed’s recent exhibition The Unreal at United Colors Gallery, in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood of Kansas City, KS, is at once pared down and immersive—much like the prairie that is its primary subject. The show, a tightly controlled study of non-human figure, ground, and ecosystem, is composed of ceramic works that evoke speculative organisms inspired by the prairie. They are mounted in the gallery and connected by a jagged web of brown stripes painted on the walls. Reed’s show creates a queer, figurative ecoscape in which the unreal—that is, the speculative, possible, or unrecognizable—surges forth as material forms that defy the stable nomenclatures of human culture.

Above With Those Dark Wings (In Awe) acts as a kind of talismanic anchor for the rest of the show. This ceramic sculpture takes the form of a hybrid bird–moth creature, shaggy feathers swaying to the right in flight, its open beak/antennae pointing upwards. Reed created this piece after an encounter with a large bird that flew out of prairie grass into the sky above, blocking the sun. This was the first piece Reed made for the show and the most apparently animal. Caught on the wall mid-flight, about to soar through the gallery ceiling and out of view, this creature floats at the threshold of legibility—we almost, but not quite, think we can identify it: “Oh, it’s a…,” but then the voice trails off into a silence replete with uncertainty and possibility. Spokes of brown, painted on the wall, radiate from the ceramic piece as if rays of sunlight, suggesting that this creature is blocking the sun, yes, but also that it is a kind of sun itself, a center of being that shines with earth.

The brown stripes emanating from each ceramic sculpture are actually made of slip—that is, watered-down clay. Reed has sourced all the clay in this show, both sculptures and slip, from Missouri. The walls, in other words, have been painted and mounted with local ground. The undulating horizontality of the prairie gets mapped onto the flat, geometrical verticality of the gallery wall. The radiating slip–stripes are similarly geometrical, with all straight lines and corners. In connecting each piece, they mimic the ecosystem of the prairie, its rich web of roots and signals beneath the surface, while also presenting a more abstracted representation of that interconnection. Iconographically, they also invoke the sun, a ruling entity in the prairie and one of the show’s central motifs. The slip’s slippage between ground and sky suggest a landscape that is not quite a landscape at all, where a stable terrestrial system has yet to be pinned down. The horizon, the prairie’s dominating line that normally bisects the visual field, gets displaced as the bright rectangles of United Colors’s large, west-facing windows. It’s as if the prairie has been tipped onto its side and rendered in the geometry its organisms experience: passing back and forth between light and clay, sky-work and network. 

The prairie in Kansas and Missouri has its own unrealities, an ecosystem that is more expansive, perhaps, in our imaginations than in reality. Were we to fully unfold the word “prairie,” we would witness a vast unrolling landscape of connotations—an endangered ecosystem, a historical fact, a stewarded wilderness tied to genocide, a stable word for a system in constant motion, a resurgent form in speculative futures. American colonialism has decimated the prairie, leaving intact only a scrap of what used to be here, much of it now part of a patchwork preserves. Those original settlers saw the prairie as empty desert: they could not make out the rich depths of entanglement that the prairie’s vast planar structure encodes; their worldview would not render that reality legible to them. It is devastating to imagine this point of view, when in our current age it is exactly that muted, sublime expansiveness that captivates us. I find this especially true as an East Coast transplant in Kansas City: I’m used to a higher, closer horizon, fuzzed out by nearby trees or tall buildings—whereas the prairie is markedly different, horizontally extending its undulating plane forever, not so much cut off as compressed by infinite regress into the sky. There is unending prairie in this imagined figuration.

In The Unreal, ceramic “organisms” emerge from walls painted with the same clay they are made of. Reed sculpts these creatures as if concentrating the landscape, implying that they each come into being as a condensation of their environment, a recursive knotted figuration of the given—figure as formed ground. The show’s complex browns hover between bronze and rust, or between winter-withering and compost-ready plant matter. One of the pleasures of this exhibition is each organism’s detailing. For instance, in The Protection and Collectivity of the Partridge Pea,  tendrilled stamen erupting from a flower’s center are punctuated with black daubs along their surfaces, as if little elbow joints, or pockmarks, or spores, or some other biological encrustation. Who can definitively read a plant’s body? These organisms are complexly self-involved and resist easy prettiness, easy grotesqueness, or easy legibility of any kind. Something about their being here together allows this elusive self-involvement, which we do not begrudge, because it is really more like the recursive fullness of being alive—a kind of blooming, a redoubling concentration of the ground as emergent form.

At the same time, an allusive hybridity acts as the show’s creative engine. Some pieces suggest plant life and others animal life, but in general the feeling is of hovering somewhere in between the two, of borrowing a little bit from both kingdoms. These ceramics are intricately structured, and as the eye refocuses, the unified whole of each organism gives way to parts that themselves look like separate organisms, or anatomical elements lifted from and grafted onto completely different species. The feathers on a bird also look like leaves. Flowers act as orifices. Reed plays with imagery from the actual prairie itself, and imagined forms take morphological cues from what really exists out there in the grasses. The artistic activity undergirding this show is in large part re-combinatorial; that is, chimeric: a little bit of this species, a little bit of that. A modular naturalism. 

An Affinity Towards the Sun (Compass Plant), basically a flower made of flowers, acts as perhaps the simplest statement of this modular naturalism. At its base, a large rim of petals, colored in the show’s typical earthy bronze (I think of the prairie’s late-autumn browns), supports a center that is massed with smaller flowers and leaves. The “actual” compass plant is a sunflower-like stalk whose leaves reliably point in a north–south direction, while tilting their faces east and west, minimizing water loss from sun exposure. In Reed’s sculpture, you can glimpse these leaves piled up under the two central flowers that peer out from its face almost, but not quite, like eyes. By stacking flowers and arranging plant parts to form a larger flower, Reed suggests the unity of any organism can be decomposed into the unities of smaller beings.

It can be tempting to make the sun stand in for a hierarchical unity at the heart of nature: all plants pointing towards this single source of energy, each planet revolving around this godlike center of gravity in our heliocentric solar system. In the plant kingdom, heliotropism refers to the process by which a plant redirects its growth in response to its source of sunlight. With this in mind, the compass plant certainly has a complicated affinity for the sun—from which it must draw nourishment in the form of light, while not relinquishing too much in the form of water. Reed’s constructed plant also has an affinity with the sun, as rays of brown slip emanate from it like spokes of sunlight. Its compass-tuned leaves have been folded and stacked within it like a compressed, self-referencing code for directionality, a nest of compass points. It points towards itself and becomes its own sun. Perhaps we are closer to heliomultiplicity here, each organism a sun in a system without a center, reconfiguring geological and astronomical givens.

Other pieces travel even further down the path of hybridity, envisioning a queer nature that disrupts biological and cultural categories. Attracting What You Need (Milkweed) looks as much like the shaggy carapace of some unidentified creature as it does a plant. A giant cross between an armadillo or beetle shell and a pinecone, the sculpture is symmetrically punctuated (again) by two small flowers that read, in this chimerical context, almost as lungs. In Reed’s framing, the short-circuiting of the plant and animal binary parallels a rejection of the gender binary. Our culture’s language, and the classifications embedded within it, prove inadequate for naming the forms that life takes—whether in terms of gender or species. There is a gap between the “real” according to culture and the “real” according to, well, reality itself. Not only what does exist, but what could exist, or what once seemed impossible but now has come into existence: new species, new means of relating to gender. “The Unreal” makes way for a union between the possible and the material that goes far beyond what human culture and knowledge can currently name. To put it more simply, in Reed’s hands, the unreal is real.

Lately, there seems to be a sense that figuration (that is, the literal representation of actual forms and objects, especially the human body) has returned to popularity in contemporary visual art (could it ever really go anywhere?) without an attendant reinvention for our current moment. Perhaps this return is symptomatic of a bourgeois desire for a return to “normalcy” despite a planet in crisis. Or perhaps it is a perverse doubling down on the surge of faces and bodies our social media apps confront us with on a daily basis, a hair-of-the-dog approach to the perpetual social hangover of contemporary life. Maybe there is simply no letting up on the incessant grappling with human form, and the politicized history of that grappling, that constitutes our embodied existence. Whatever the diagnosis—if you really do consider this new-old literalism a problem in the first place—Reed’s exhibition raises the possibility of a speculative figuration, one that constructs non-existent non-human bodies. It is still partially representational, even indexical, in how it appropriates aspects of real organisms, yet also “unreal” in its abstraction away from these actual beings, creating new creatures out of old parts. At the same time, this speculative figuration is historical in the sense that it engages with natural history. Or better yet, it enacts that history: the ongoing creation of the real out of the possible by deep time.

Furthermore, by creating and arranging these pieces as part of a cohesive ecology, rather than as autonomous artworks that are each viewed in isolation, Reed turns the whole show into a landscape that goes beyond what we usually mean by landscape; it shifts underneath landscape, pre-exists it, shows us how a prairie comes into being by carrying us into that process. The viewer acts as the only human presence in this show, their perceptual field becoming a perceptual prairie populated by ceramic organisms, as if we ourselves are the depths of dirt. We participate in the collapse of landscape and figuration into a new genre. Beyond the twin anthropic realms of abstract expression and human figuration, between ground and form, Reed charts a path that mimics the evolutionary drive of nature itself: probing, mutating, creating. A figurative ecoscape.

Another piece, Flight of the Green Striped Grasshopper & the Loss of Tallgrass Nutrients hints at the narrative potential of this new figurative ecoscape. This piece depicts a tuft of webbed grasshopper wings embedded in windswept strands of grass. Yet these wing-like, insectoid structures could just as well be plants themselves, a bush-full of wing-leaves. This plant-insect hybrid, seemingly caught at a single kinetic instant in time, also has a narrative component, as an extension of an ongoing process: the wind sweeps through the grass, and the grasshoppers molt through each of their six “instars,” or stages, of development; meanwhile, changes in climate and other anthropic effects cause shifts in the ecosystem—the grasshoppers leave, nutrients fade. Plant and animal are intertwined. This unfolding story of ecological change, yet to be fully resolved, becomes embodied in the piece’s speculative form.

Once, artists confronted an absolute nature, up to which they shakily held a mirror—though their hands grew steadier as the history of technique progressed. Now, it is technique that is absolute. Our technosphere dominates the planet and the mirror-world of screens becomes our ever-reinvented reality. “Nature” now appears to us as evolving systems whose change we humans are accelerating, precisely through our technology. By the time you look back at the mirror, nature has changed. The general state of affairs on our planet is that the real surges forth with a vengeance, at the same time it is undermined by its own revisability. Life constantly surges beyond the given. Perhaps better, then, or more truthful, to cast one’s art beyond the given as well.

SK Reed’s The Unreal is on view at the United Colors Gallery (611 N 6th Street, Kansas City) from October 18 – November 30, 2024.

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