Untitled (Mysterious Pool) c. 1945

Curator: Oh, this is a fun one. “Untitled (Mysterious Pool)” by Dickson Reeder, likely created around 1945. It’s an etching in ink on paper. It's really rather dreamlike, don't you think? Editor: Absolutely, a complete jumble of strange occurrences and bizarre imagery. Sort of a haunted attic, maybe? It’s… unsettlingly whimsical? Curator: Precisely. I mean, what do you make of that cylindrical form dominating the upper register of the scene? There’s a strange creature emerging. And the ladder… leaning against absolutely nothing! Editor: The ladder reads like a failed social project – a way to organize chaos that's still trapped in some previous iteration. The ladders always remind me of a Tower of Babel scheme: “let's build a new, impossible future”, which then lies scattered or partially achieved and lost, such as we can glimpse in this etching. There is almost an alchemic quality, if such a term makes sense. A process. I sense that there are narratives unfolding for Reeder that escape me; however, his process has something almost violent to it in the arrangement. Curator: The "violent arrangement" I like it! The overlapping planes, and clashing elements, do evoke a certain tension. Yet, there’s an intriguing balance as well. Reeder walked a very tight line in many of these images of tension; not everyone enjoyed these early Surrealists so much. And of course, the pool itself at the bottom… so deep, and unknowable, almost a mirror image of that chaos. I suppose those earlier wars always made people wary, uneasy about just where you are and when... Editor: True! The printing ink adds to the sense of a slightly off-kilter existence – this hazy world that seems just at the edge of perception, yet beyond logical comprehension. A very common situation for some. The lines have such deliberate weight, they are suggestive but don’t give anything away; like the barest clue on a cold night of something terrible just around the corner! Reeder’s hand shows a talent for imbuing the space between thought and emotion. This “Mysterious Pool” captures a state of flux, doesn’t it? Curator: Indeed, it does. And this is why I think it has to linger. It doesn’t offer simple answers, and really no clear paths or meanings; and so maybe there is a ladder leading nowhere, like the end of a book or the punchline of a good joke. Just echoes to contemplate. Editor: That's true, but a very engaging set of contemplations all the same, a set of complex memories caught, for all time, in a vat of printer’s ink! I wonder who owned them when Reeder was alive... Curator: I do too, friend. It's a conversation for another time...