Bodega is pleased to present a new series of works by New York based artist Carlos Reyes. These works continue Reyes’s material based exploration of displaced sites of desire, loss, and celebration. For his presentation at MECA, Reyes has reconsidered a series of red velvet display panels from Sarah Jewelry, a small shop on the Lower East Side of New York City. The images on the panels are photographic byproducts of months of sun exposure in the shop window, branding the velvet with silhouettes of the necklaces, hoop earrings, and nameplates that they once displayed. The velvet has been lifted from its original substrate and hung from aluminum armatures as “skins”: pliable, fragile, and distressed. These resulting sculptures provide pause on the ubiquitous encounter of glancing through a shop window, offering a meditation on the elements of time, light, and memory.
Carlos Reyes was born in 1977 in Chicago, IL, and received his MFA from New York University in 2011. He has held solo and two-person exhibitions at Bodega, New York; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; Vie d’Ange, Montreal; Jan Kaps, Cologne; Arcadia Missa, London; and Tomorrow, New York, among others. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at venues including Centre Pompidou, Paris (forthcoming); ArkDes Museum, Stockholm; the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale; Luxembourg & Dayan, New York; X Bienal de Nicaragua, Managua; CCS Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague; Bortolami, New York; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; What Pipeline, Detroit; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin.