These Are Not Fables

These Are Not Fables reflects on COVID-19 and the role of plague, or disease, in creating social unrest and structural change over time. Each in a series of six altars within the 40-foot long structure is dedicated to a different aspect of pandemic experience. Esoteric coping strategies, tools for single people longing for touch, DIY medical technologies, and an urgent grappling with mortality connect us to our predecessors’ struggles to understand and bear witness to an incomprehensible toll taken by a tiny powerful force. From the bubonic plague of the middle ages to the 1918 influenza epidemic and the emergence of AIDS in the 1980s, These are Not Fables draws parallels to our most recent encounter with a little understood virus. 

The installation culminates with a rotating Tower card, one of the major arcana of the Tarot. Depending on its position – upright or reversed – the Tower card can suggest calamity or a new beginning. This spinning tarot card, suspended over two chalices, indicates two paths unfolding before the visitor- asking them to choose which direction to take.  A sculpture of a coffin sits at the front of the installation for visitors to lay down in and contemplate their own mortality, in the spirit of being more mindful of how we spend our time here on Earth.

As we move forward within and beyond this pandemic moment, These Are Not Fables asks us to consider what we have learned during this time. What do we want to commit to changing, and how do we do that? What rituals can be created to help us remember? One of the altars in the installation offers a large mailbox for visitors to deposit letters to themselves based on prompts around these questions. Letters are collected to be sent in one year’s time as a reminder for all who participate. 

“Reed’s installation is exemplary of our current artistic moment. Poised somewhere at the crossroads of social practice and the physically distanced present, it looks back bittersweetly at the dream of relational art as pure conviviality or connectivity. These Are Not Fables is a gallery of solitude, a catalog of the ways we make meaning when we’re grasping at straws.” -Curator Melissa Ragain