Richard Reddaway | A Late of Zanies

Richard Reddaway, A Late of Zanies, 2021, paint, cardboard, electrical components and MP3 audio track by Bryce Galloway.

Part of The 9th Suter Contemporary Art Project, Kiss me, Hardy! (but not like that), Richard Reddaway’s A Late of Zanies are an almost anthropomorphic collection of speaker creatures. Made from recycled materials they emit a soundtrack designed by Bryce Galloway. They are further anthropomorphized through their title, A Late of Zanies, which is suggestive of a collective noun - a single descriptor for a group of individuals. Collective nouns are often incredibly strange, some revealing, others incomprehensible, most invented simply as humourous word plays - a bunch of flowers, a sleuth of bears, a murder of crows, an ambush of widows, or an equivocation of politicians. Richard’s objects become a new kind of creature, ‘zany’, with their own autonomous relationships and conversations which we observe from afar. A Late of Zanies comments on materiality, performance and the struggle to understand, participate in, or quantify collective identity during late-stage Capitalism (the creation of the collective noun for zany as ‘late’ is no accident here). How do we exist within collectives, with people in a society that is so fractured? One of the symptoms of late-stage Capitalism is the extreme commercialisation of the world around us.

We don’t have hobbies, we have side-hustles; we don’t have personalities, we are brands. The only way to process this reality is through the strange, absurd and zany.

Artist Profile

Since the mid-1980s Richard Reddaway has been making sculpture, both sticks-and-stones stuff and the stuff of photography, in which the body, the figural, carries meaning as well as formal delight. His practice fills space with often noisy, colourful objects to explore, amongst other things, Chaotic complexity, Globalism and the local, and what it might mean to be Pākehā. His latest obsession is making art “work” to find a way out of neo-liberalism into the social, perhaps through a contemporary understanding of the Baroque. Richard studied sculpture at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, has an MFA from RMIT University, spent six months at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and has undertaken residencies in the Netherlands, Mexico and Ecuador. He currently works at Massey University Whiti-o-Rehua School of Art in Wellington.