chris reiner

Reiner has always been drawn to objects that have been discarded by society. From a young age he found little things that had no context, that could be assigned some meaning. Little did he know then that the capacity to look at the world sideways is the source of tremendous creative capital, but he has come to appreciate the ways in which thinking outside the conventional has become integral to his work. He would also find it fascinating to take things apart to see how they work and then put them back together again. Function trumped aesthetics; how things worked was more important than how they looked.

Reiner entered the Ringling School of Art & Design in Sarasota, Florida in 1991, initially majoring in illustration, but soon shifting to three-dimensional work. He graduated in 1995 with a BFA, having produced a thesis exhibition that already began to focus on aspects of technology, and the intersections of human machine cultures.

Along the way, he found an aesthetic niche through an affinity with an unlikely mix of sensibilities: a high modern (“form follows function”) imperative, a love of 1940’s to 1970’s aesthetics, and a calling to become, as he notes, “...a steward/historian for wayward objects doomed for bulk pick-up.” that he refers to as OBTAINIUM. Though the term might seem to suggest some newly-discovered space-age metal, this actually refers to “...found objects, rejected history...to be ever entombed in human unwant. I am inspired by their potential stories and moved by their beauty. They become a homogenized whole, bringing their own bits of history to each piece, a wise seasoned whole.”

Reiner made his mark early on through the creation of award-winning, one of a kind pieces of art and furniture that were really functional sculptures, often making use of found or recycled elements. Despite the humble nature of many of his materials, Reiner works with a high degree of craftsmanship, seeking continual refinement in the assembly and finishing the pieces he creates. Reiner’s sensibilities as an artist suggest a kinship with other inventive spirits as disparate as Jean Tinguely and Rube Goldberg. Both Tinguely’s kinetic (and often self-destructive) sculptures and Goldberg’s drawings for extraordinarily elaborate apparatuses designed to achieve a totally mundane or goofy end result were, in their own ways, wry commentaries of the seductions of technology. Reiner follows in this vein in asking us to consider what it might be like to live in a world in which nothing is left but left-overs, and the verdict is not yet in on who will prevail in “man vs. machine: debate. Beneath the playful surface of Reiner’s work lie some serious questions, as mechanical and aesthetic metaphors point the way to metaphysical pondering.