Macon Reed

All Witches Are Gay

“Third rule of magic. ‘If you can’t keep it down, don’t bring it up.’”

–Grant Morrison. Zatanna. No. 2. New York:
DC Comics, 2005. Print, p. 17.

GATHER THESE INGREDIENTS

Stifled laughter of a teen goth

Postcard mailed from summer camp

Funny story recorded for radio

Panties turned inside out for extra days of wear

Euphoric memory fragment from radical faeries at Idapalooza

Dyke with a clipboard energy

Furtive, erotic sidelong glance in women’s locker room

Coin pried from the face of a tarot pentacle card

Drink ticket from drag show

Fire roasted marshmallow

Nipple piercing

Hair of crone

Diva cup

“Magic is the queer idea that your body is a broomstick. Life and magic are transient. Just as quickly as the shaman appears, he can disappear. There are no guarantees or promises in magic. It is fickle and easily goes dormant. It curls up in a corner or fold of our brains and takes a long nap. When this happens, it is important to remember that magic is more internal than external, and it doesn’t just lie hidden in our brains, blood, bones, and DNA, it is our brains, blood, bones, and DNA. The primary lesson of both deep ecology and deep gossip is that life is always already magic, always already queer.”

–Peter Hobbs. “THE ART OF DRIFTING: 43 LESSONS FROM
A NAKED COCKTAIL PARTY.” Queer Spirits.
New York: Creative Time, 2011. Print, p. 172

INVOKE THESE SPIRITS

Maud Gault

Audre Lorde

Hilma af Klint

Virginia Woolf

Radclyffe Hall

Patricia Highsmith

Susan Sontag

Lou Sullivan

Doris Grau

Louise Fishman

Tori Amos

Punky Brewster

Silvia Federici

Hildegard of Bengin

Georgia O’Keeffe

José Esteban Muñoz

Rachel Pollack

Mark Aguhar

“Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not…At least, I thought in those early days, once I cast a spell, I would not have to learn it again. But even that was not true. All I could carry with me from last time was the knowledge it could be done.”

–Madeline Miller. Circe. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018. Print, pp. 83–85.

PERFORM THESE RITUALS

Bleed

Put down your phone

Remember

Moon gaze

Stay in touch

Vaccinate

Hot flash

Pee outside, barefoot

Prune

Drink

Wonder

Keep reading

Make a list of all your passwords for your loved ones to use after you die

Bathe

Dream

Excavate

“The sorceress, who in the end is able to dream Nature and therefore conceive it, incarnates the reinscription of the traces of paganism that triumphant Christianity repressed…This feminine role, the role of the sorceress, of hysteric, is ambiguous, antiestablishment, and conservative at the same time. Antiestablishment because the symptoms—the attacks—revolt and shake up the public, the group, the men, the others to whom they are exhibited. The sorceress heals, against the Church’s canon; she performs abortions, favors nonconjugal love, converts the unlivable space of a stifling Christianity… every sorceress ends up being destroyed.”

–Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1986. Print, p. 5

COMPLETE THESE TASKS

There are certain continuities between painting and installation, and also quite divergent orientations. The installation is pliant, inviting, immersive, interactive: it lends itself to gathering, claiming space, events, programming, and selfies. Paintings, by comparison, are stubborn, hard, and opaque. They issue invitations, but they are for you to slam your meat and bones into an illusion, Wile E. Coyote style. Paintings are props, tools, talisman, windows peering into mud.

The wand chooses the wizard. None of us asked for a pandemic, and most folks still avoid examining the implications of how our views of life, death, future, progress, globalism, nationalism, the real, and the fantastic have been irreversibly impacted by such a sweeping ongoing event that stays far beyond our control.

For various reasons, queer people keep aspects of childhood close; aesthetics, attributes, affinities that are often relegated to the young within heterosexist mainstreams are, within queer community, protracted and explored. Partly because prohibitions kept us from fully embracing our childhood fantasies. Partly because we often appear to fail at the stabilizing, reifying signals of heteronormative mature adulthood, bound as they are to mandates for biological reproduction, the accumulation of capitalist wealth, and assumptions about the forms taken by family, home, love, commitment, and meaningful work.

Witchcraft is having a moment, and it would be silly to ignore the capitalizing, popularizing, exploiting, and diluting that is occurring to longstanding countercultural approaches to direct action that, under the auspices of magic, tether the material conditions of our civilization and ecosystem to forces of desire more invisible and more undefined.

“We end by talking about magic and the power of words. Firstly, Donald Trump. He’s still the president, which means that the hex Del Rey asked her Twitter followers to cast on February 24 hasn’t worked (yet). So did she get involved and do it herself?
‘Yeah, I did it. Why not? Look, I do a lot of s**t.’
Do you cast other spells at home?
‘…[T]here’s a power to the vibration of a thought. Your thoughts are very powerful things and they become words, and words become actions, and actions lead to physical changes…I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic and I’m a bit of a mystic at heart.’”

–Nick Reilly. “Lana Del Rey Confirms Attempt to Use Witchcraft Against Donald Trump.” NME. 21 July 2017.
Accessed 12 February 2024.

For over a decade, artist Macon Reed has blurred the boundaries of the everyday into transportive tableau, events, and objects that carry in them queer histories and trenchant concerns about the vulnerability, preciousness, and often misunderstood dimensions of embodiment. Dyke bars, gymnasiums, press conference stages, and apothecaries have been transfigured into bold, playful Simpsons-style adult cartoons that audiences have been welcomed to enter, inhabit, and explore. These charged sites are excited not only by searing, radiant, high chroma surface coloring, but also teeming questions about how bodies are regulated, validated, and variously normalized or queered within the social. Often, Reed’s installations are positioned along thresholds of forgetting, tasked with holding vigil over the disappearances, obfuscations, and erasures of queer and femme bodies falling out of the violently maintained centralism of patriarchy.

Throughout these years, while Reed has reimagined known and nascent sites for alternate histories and counternarratives, she has also conjured an expanding universe of magical intervention, uneasy matriarchies, lively occultism, and remixes of occult iconography. From the ashes of witch trials, foreclosures on queer owned businesses, and the vestiges of that other pandemic, HIV/AIDS, which staggers along lacking the triaged priority for vaccination and cure that COVID has attracted—Reed opens hot pink-purple portals into secret lairs, BDSM-y Hellfire Clubs, astral charts, and womb-like crystalline caverns.

The paintings and objects on view at RUSCHMAN have been smuggled gay-Sam-and-Frodo style from the annals and stories and hidden passageways of these queer infrastructures. An intoxicating mix of casual spiritualism, age play, LARPing, and dyke-y road trip style escapism.

Reed acts out like the New Age political activist cousin of Avenue Q, the 2003 grownup content puppet musical. Hers is a language shared with dyke peers and forebears: a heavenly pantheon populated with Amelia Peláez’s juicy, lezzy fruit still life paintings; the fanciful femme fables painted by Leonor Fini and Marie Laurencin; Ellsworth Kelly’s simultaneously voluptuous and reductive color-forms; James Bidgood’s libidinous kitsch reveries; and Jojo Baby’s darkly mischievous Chicago drag and dolls. And at close range are Allyson Mitchell’s castles and dungeons; Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Homes, and mother substitutes; Jade Yumang’s camp-horror arts-and-crafts; Jesse Harrod’s rainbow hued pathways to the erotic by way of the ornamental; Elijah Burgher’s sigil work; the punk grande dame missives of Vaginal Davis; and the butch and chunky abstractions of Lisi Raskin and Sadie Benning. No one knows you like family, and working queerly, one often has to cast some spells to even find that family let alone familiarize. Macon Reed has made a magic shop from where we may all procure the kits, tools, personal and social histories, and capacity for dreaming-big imagination to render revolutionary enchantments.

“Eleka nahmen nahmen
Ah tum ah tum eleka nahmen
Eleka nahmen nahmen
Ah tum ah tum eleka… eleka…
Ugh! What good is this chanting?
I don’t even know what I’m reading
I don’t even know what trick I ought to try….”

–Stephen Schwartz. “No Good Deed.” Wicked.
Decca Broadway, 2003.

Macon Reed works in sculpture, installation, video, painting, performance, and participatory projects. Primarily, they create large immersive, handmade installations that host extensive participatory programming through a queer and intersectional feminist lens. A set of central concerns guides each project; consensual power exchange, inquiry towards the collective, and bringing histories or communities together that have been overlooked or structurally disconnected from one another. Reed is also known for their painting and video works.

Reed completed an MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. Reed’s work has been exhibited at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, PULSE NYC Special Projects, National Art School (Sydney), San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Spring Break Art Show, Columbia University, Transmediale Vorspiel (Berlin), La Patinoire Royale (Brussels), University of New South Wales Gallery (Sydney). They have completed fellowships at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology, and the Royal Academy of Arts (London). Reed’s work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Artnet News, ArteTV Paris, ArteTV Germany, Whitewall, Hyperallergic, Vice, and The Washington Post.

“Could she will herself there? Right now? Vanish from the street and reappear at the doorway? Eyes still closed, she drew her body into herself, arms across her chest, feet together, chin down. She tried to let the music fill her, expand her, make her a pulse of sound. No. The Songs were real, and the Gates, and Beatrix, serene and patient, but so were the buses and the museum building and the couple arguing down the street. She laughed and opened her eyes. All right then, she would do it the old-fashioned way… And with that understanding, once upon a time ended, and she lived happily ever after, forever and never.”

–Rachel Pollack. “The Beatrix Gates.” The Beatrix Gates Plus. Oakland: PM Press, 2019. Print, pp. 40, 43

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