Rae Reid /
Closet Dwellers
9/23/2020
01 - About the Artist
Raewyn Reid is a non-binary artist located on Treaty 7 Territory in Mohkinstis (Calgary). Since graduating from the drawing department at the Alberta University of the Arts in the spring of 2020, they’ve spent the majority of their time playing softball, collecting unwanted single socks, and unsuccessfully training their unruly (but lovable) mutant cat. Some days they wish they were either god or a scientist so that they could put an end to COVID-19 and reestablish hugs as an acceptable social custom.
02 - About the Work
Closet Dwellers is comprised of an assortment of found single socks that have lost their respective partners. Without their matching correspondents, these outliers have been declared useless; banished to the back of closets, lost in the bottom of laundry baskets, and forgotten in the depths of dressers drawers… Until now.
These wayward objects stand together in resistance to the convention that socks - much like people - must adhere to a binary system in order to be deemed publicly acceptable. Contending with issues of normalcy, a term that has long been used to invalidate queerness and other modes of open sexual expression, the Closet Dwellers unite to form an unapologetically visible community of misfits
