Hats off! 

5 – 26 October 2013

Please note: the exhibition has been extended until Saturday 2 November

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition catalogue

'What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up - after he's read it through, of course - and say to his staff, 'Gentlemen, Hats off!'' - The Plague, Albert Camus

Hats off! is Chloё Reid’s debut solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP. She recently graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, majoring in print-making. 

Hats off! Includes etchings, drawings and installations and engages a series of narratives - many of them appropriated from literary sources - that deal with failure and its role in artistic expression. The process began, according to Reid, with the notion, discussed by Mark Jeffrey Sachner in Failure as a Human and Literary Form (1981), that we have 'progressed beyond a point of understanding our own cultural expressions' - that words and, by extension, art, fails as a means of reflecting our experience. This fairly well-trodden path, she continues to say, led inadvertently to C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words, a practical guide in semantic change. The removal/cutting out of the five most used words in the English language from this text, produced the first five works in the body of work. Considering the regularity of the use of these words, Reid deduces that they are perhaps less likely to fail as a means of transmitting a message than other words. The exhibition magnifies from this point. 

Reid’s work underlines the process and labour involved in the production of her art and the gap that often stretches between the intentions of the artist at the start of a work and the result. 

Chloë Reid was born in Johannesburg in 1989. She graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town in 2011, majoring in print-making. She has participated in a number of group shows including, most recently, Makers in Print: International Exhibition on the SGC International Printmaking Conference 2013 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 2012 she was awarded residencies at the Bag Factory and CAMAC, France.