Global Weirding, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel1500 x 500 mmPrice on request Catastrophe Theory, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel1500 x 500 mmPrice on request I'm Just Saying, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel1500 x 500 mmPrice on request Utopia, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel1500 x 500 mmPrice on request Funky Capitalism, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel1500 x 500 mmPrice on request Garden of Earthly Delights, 2014Reflective signs, vinyl and steel350mm X 500 mm Price on request John Reynolds’ Road Signs might cause you to do a double take. Fluorescent and incongruous to the landscape, they appear almost functional: will we heed their warnings? It’s only when we read their puzzling text and see their placement along the sculpture trail that we can understand them as representing Reynolds’ art practice succinctly. The enduring qualities of his work that continue to draw viewers into his sphere - wit, and restless energy with a conceptual streak and agitation of culture - also confound us. Road signs are easily read by everyone, yet these are disconcerting with their off-centre warnings: Funky Capitalism, Global Weirding, Catastrophe Theory, Utopia and Garden of Earthy Delights. There is no sense to be made in these works. Reynolds seems to enjoy disrupting our search for coherency. Dead-pan humour, juxtapositions and a liking of ‘artless’ objects recalls early modernist explorations into the reverence of ‘high’ art and the subversion of this with found objects. Certainly, Reynolds’ Road Signs are placed in the midst of a dynamic sculpture trail that often undermine the materiality and mundanity of his works with their scale and price-tag. His interest in this juxtaposition of ‘art’ and the ‘familiar’, the hybridity of material or idea (or both), acts as a surprise to us - it poses a problem, a complication, to how we usually view art. Reynolds says of this effect: “It’s a mixture of collude and collide.”
