DAVID REED — Two Bedrooms in San Francisco, Walter/McBean Gallery, 1992

David Reed, Two Bedrooms in San Francisco. Walter/McBean Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, 16 July–15 August 1992. Staple-bound exhibition publication; 12 pages, 20 × 15 cm; black-and-white offset printing with blue typography.

A small publication produced for David Reed’s 1992 exhibition Two Bedrooms in San Francisco, a project in which painting, cinema and reconstructed space were deliberately allowed to interfere with one another.

Reed used Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo as an existing architecture. Paintings were inserted into the film’s bedroom interiors, allowing works made decades later to occupy a fictional San Francisco that already existed in cultural memory. The cinematic rooms were then carried back toward physical exhibition space.

The publication follows the same logic. Car window. Street. Empire Hotel. Unmade bed. Film still. Exhibition. It does not begin by presenting Reed’s paintings as autonomous objects. Instead, it establishes the places through which they have been made to travel. The catalogue reads almost like a location file: images collected around an exhibition whose subject is partly the instability of location itself.

A painting enters an existing film image. The film becomes a temporary exhibition site. The fictional room becomes physical space. The exhibition returns to photography. The photographs become a twelve-page publication. The painting remains the same. Its placement does not.

That movement gives Two Bedrooms in San Francisco its particular conceptual charge. Painting is no longer confined to canvas; it becomes something that can be inserted, projected, remembered, reconstructed and recirculated through another image system. The booklet is therefore more than documentation of the project. It is another stage of it. A modest exhibition catalogue operating between artist book, film document, location study and administrative record.

Condition: Good to very good. Light handling and surface wear, minor edge and corner softening and small marks consistent with age and circulation. Internally clean from the pages inspected.

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