The Fight Between Carnival and the Quotidian

2009 | One bag of hand sorted confetti (by colour) ordered in a Cartesian Grid. | Each Panel: 81 cm X 81 cm framed | Total pieces of confetti +9000

The Fight Between Carnival and the Quotidian takes its point of inspiration from Pieter Bruegel’s painting “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” (1559) where an abutment of social forces plays out in a market square between a convent and a bar/brothel. In the contemporary variant, confetti is deployed as the medium of collective bacchanal, yet a medium which has been perversely re-ordered and classified into a categorical formal system, denied of its inherent celebratory capacity. A tension ensues between the everyday  taxonomies of bureaucratic structures and the chaotic plurality of things and peoples they seek to organize and (ac)count for.

patricia_reed_fight_between_full

Full Installation View: 8m long (Click image for large view)

panel1

Panel 1
Each panel: 76 cm X 76 cm, 1025 pieces of confetti per panel

panel2

Panel 2

panel3

Panel 3

panel4

Panel 4

panel5

Panel 5

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Panel 6

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Panel 7

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Panel 8

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Panel 9

framed