What is the moment when security measures stop supporting us in place and begin to pin us down? Is the border of self-entrapment and self-preservation so murky that I cannot differentiate until I’m already entangled? This duality comes to mind in Reid Calvert’s latest images—a triptych of ordinary bushes on the side of the highway, gently covered by lace-like netting. The nets embrace the plants like a spider’s web; three soft blue lines across its surface serve as the only indicator of its manufactured materiality.
Having spent a year taking images of people for promotional use, Reid is no stranger to navigating nuanced definitions. Monetization of photos blurs the ability to make images that don’t function as content, every Behind The Scenes (BTS) image needing an assigned use value. The impossibility of defining yourself as a queer artist when queerness is inherently indefinable. What’s the concrete surface to hold onto? Maybe there just isn’t one?
I return to the blue lines that tether yet seem to point me upward, away from what’s in front of me. The color of calm and still, the thing you’re always trying not to be, even blue cannot escape its fate of gradation. Thinking of Reid grabbing his camera, the same one used on numerous commercial jobs, I can’t help but appreciate the small spotlights on the webbed masses, each reveling in its moment sans set crews and artifice. Ordinary but not arbitrary, I consider every seemingly banal photo’s ability to hold the essence of the living. These are self-portraits. Selfies, if you must.
