biographies

• Leon Reid (Darius Jones)
• Brad Downey

Leon Reid (Darius Jones)

New York-based artist Leon Reid doesn't say much about his work. Sturdy steel sculptures, personified bricks, and sloping sign posts speak for him, resonating with witty messages about isolation, race, irony, love, humor and tension.

Reid is among New York's most prolific young artists — and after a decade of street work he's just getting around to showing his work in proper art galleries. Using the name Darius Jones, approximately 150 pieces have been successfully installed and viewed by millions of casual observers since he moved to the city to pursue an arts education in 1998 at Pratt Institute.

While he developed his aptitude toward classical subject matter working toward a fine arts degree in the classroom, the street afforded him the canvas and audience to explore issues that were displayed by traditional institution. “I had the capability to make fine art but I couldn't see a link to people who looked like me,” Reid explains

Reid was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1979 and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he first began to toy with the notion of art as a necessary public service needed in both established metropolitan areas and blighted urban communities. Coming of age in the 1990s, he was influenced by graffiti art culture, while his upbringing provided inspiration by osmosis from bebop classics of the earlier twentieth century, particularly Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. At age 15 he sparked a hotbed debate with his teenage graffiti pseudonym, VERBS that he prominently displayed on highway overpasses, skyscrapers and street signs in both Cincinnati and New York. He extended his means for public artistic expression in 2000 dropping VERBS and traditional graffiti art and adopting a new street art persona with the pen name Darius Jones.

As Darius, Reid began to stretch his imagination in ways that he could make artwork engrained into the social fabric, challenging everyday people's interpretation of their surroundings. Using acquired skill in welding, he donned a hardhat and vest and went underground on New York City streets from Myrtle Ave in the heart of Brooklyn all the way to East 86th St in Manhattan. Incorporating painting and sculpture, he erected signs with timely and ironic messages, including a series incorporating telephone booths with refined signs that forces viewers to reconsider their environment, from destitute blocks to bustling street corners. A forlorn blue and white-scripted public phone sign strains on its side, leaning on the shoulder of a sympathetic one-way post. A site specific self-portrait on a phone sign recreates the surrounding environment, leaving viewers the distinct impression that they are looking in a mirror and seeing the face of the artist peering back at them.

His work has not gone unnoticed or unappreciated. The New York Times featured him in May 1, 2005 piece, describing his process in detail. “Mr. Reid removes city-owned fixtures from the streets –poles, signs, posts—and lugs them back to his workshop in Greenpoint, where he alters them in subtle and minutely designed ways. He does not steal signs that are in use.”

His work took a distinct twist during his fine art master studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Not only did he adapt to the English education system, but he researched the British infrastructure continuing to perform acts of permanent art installation. In one piece from this period, two black and white striped light posts stand three-feet apart; one of the post bends slightly, vying for a kiss from the straight post. The work creates erotic tension between seemingly mundane inanimate objects.

Reid continues to stretch the boundaries of spatial limitations on form, creating art in unlikely places that forces people to question their vantage point through visualization, and ultimately functions as a vital component of culture in a progressive society.

Brad Downey

The clean white pages of a black-bound sketchbook are never far from Brad Downey's fingers. A master of blind contours, Downey possesses an uncanny kinetic ability to recreate his vision without even looking at his pen's graceful strokes crossing the paper.

From this kaleidoscope of renderings, his ideas transform into larger streetscapes, arresting projections and elaborate imagery on canvas, Plexiglas and road signs, communicating his overall perception of the urban environment.

Downey's vehicles for self-expression are dizzying in comparison to the average one-dimensional artist. He uses film, sculpture, painting and drawing to reflect on concepts about the establishment versus the audience. Holding a fine art master's degree in painting and sculpture from London's prestigious Slade School of Art, Downey regularly lectures about unsanctioned public artwork. He is exploring its adaptation in traditional gallery settings in London, Berlin and New York. He was named as one of ArtReview's 25 MA graduates to watch in 2005. “Exploring many mediums is a necessity to realizing as many ideas as possible,” he explains.

Downey weighs out the medium he will use to evoke the message that will inevitably galvanize ordinary pedestrians into an engaged audience — what ultimately motivates him to create unsanctioned public acts of art. Whether capturing an image of an artist performing an installation or bringing a public sign to life, Downey creates a sensation of motion in his work. In one piece, a triangle yield sign has 3—dimensional children leaping from its flat surface into sculpted sinewy hands of father figure, essentially escaping the constructs of a city that traps them.

Downey was born in 1980. He grew up in a military family traversing towns across the United States, soaking up influences of converse surroundings that would later add to his perspective. “I always had a different way of looking at something standard, thinking about the city and using architecture as a different way then just as being the space you walk around in.”

Pratt Art Institute drew him to New York City in 1998, where he first cultivated his study of fine art. Stimulated by the buzz of the urbane, he sought out alternate methods for depicting his environment, deciding on a film degree for formal study. “I started thinking about the way work can consume an environment. When you put something outside and use every angle, it's placed inside of a memory.”

His first film Public Discourse, a documentary about street art, proved a pivotal point in his artistic trajectory that has recast viewers ' attitudes toward street art. The film has been screened at over 70 venues around the world including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival. “Video provides more chances to indulge your senses and 3-D space confined in one easy package,” Downey explains.

Public Discourse also compelled Downey to take an active role in the action in front of the camera as a full-fledged street artist, focusing on how to use a minimalist work to enhance people's overall sensation of their surroundings. “It's helping people take a direct role in their environment.”

With public works of art, Downey challenges the boundaries of traditional classical sentimentalities. One piece utilizes the insides of a standard bright -green American mailbox, revealing the hidden spaces in the environment's crevices. In another work, a pregnant stop sign is molded with a womb as recreation of the Madonna and Child, an evocative representation of a classic reference point. In a related piece, 2.5, a larger stop sign is saddled with a miniature counterpart, giving inanimate object human attributes. The work breathes life into the lifeless and leaves the viewer to contemplate the entire system.

Throughout, he approaches his work with a common thread designed to engage spectators as social critics. “The act or process is a positive call to arms, reminding every urban dweller that their city is their own.”