Reilly Blum: MEASURE ONCE, CUT TWICE
“The more I observe the world, the more I think artists should be active in fields where people don’t typically think they belong.”
Fall 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Moon-Randolph Homestead
View of Reilly’s installation Road Drawings at the Moon-Randolph Homestead, made of plastic marquee-letter signs and tied together with copper wire.
What's a lesson you had to unlearn, and what's the backstory?
Coming from a background in furniture design, “measure twice, cut once” is gospel. I’ve been challenging that dogma recently, thinking about how my practice can be more responsive, fluid, and less rigid. This essay makes a good case for why it can sometimes be fruitful to measure once and cut twice. That’s something I began to practice on-site at Moon-Randolph, working on an installation of glyphs and illustrations built from reclaimed marquee-letter signs I found at Home ReSource. I realized there was a pretty vast information gap between designing a module in the studio and installing it in the field, where so many unexpected variables like weather come into play. So, with my current projects, I’m leaving a lot more space for flux and change!
Reilly working in a sculpture at Moon-Randolph Homestead
Describe your Open AIR Residency experience.
Open AIR and my time at Moon-Randolph taught me a lot about working with and responding to place, particularly in the context of installation work. Coming from a furniture design background, I tend to lean heavy on the planning and pre-production side of the creative process. My projects at Open AIR were an exercise in loosening the reins a bit and the seeking out the magic hidden in that slack.
I also fell back in love with drawing. For a lot of my projects, drawing can feel like a means to an end: technical drawings are meant to convey information, not be beautiful. And when I’m making furniture and objects, a lot of the design happens on the computer. But at Open AIR, I’d begin each studio day with an hour of sketching.
Moon-Randolph is such an inspiring and special place. My studio was a wall tent overlooking hiking trails, a vast open field, and the homestead’s orchard. I loved watching the weather change, recording it in my sketchbook alongside other vignettes of scenes that inspired me around Missoula. Motifs from these hand-to-brain-connection drawings directly informed the larger installation piece I made at the Homestead.
Pages from Reilly’s sketchbook
Were there moments that surprised you or shifted your process?
Outside of the studio, I guest DJ’d a couple of times on my fellow resident Genevieve Waller’s KFGM show, The Violet Hour. Music is a huge part of my life but not something that typically makes its way into my creative practice. I played a lot of instruments as a kid, but when I decided to get serious about being a visual artist in my teens, I stopped seeing myself as a musician. So collaborating with Genevieve and seeing how our music tastes overlapped was a lot of fun. And also to exercise my curating muscle sonically rather than visually because it reminded me how porous my creative practice is.
The pressure of having to pick songs on the spot made me see parallels between artists I wouldn’t usually group together, like Smokey Robinson and Prince, or Depeche Mode and Alice Cooper.
Reilly visiting new friends Sammy and Nigel while drawing with Missoula Public Library Artist-in-Residence Genevieve Waller
In your view, what can society do to best support artists, creatives, and a thriving creative ecosystem?
I think a society that truly supports artists recognizes their power as arbiters and critics of culture. And the more I observe the world, the more I think artists should be active in fields where people don’t typically think they belong. Design-thinkers and highly creative people are good at recognizing patterns and distilling complex information visually. So, I think we need a lot more artist-organizers, artist-public school superintendents, artist-transportation designers... all of it. A thriving creative ecosystem recognizes that the role of the artist is much more nuanced than someone who makes or says pretty things. A couple of days ago, I came across this essay about James Baldwin and his embodiment of the “citizen artist.” Though it’s pretty specific to his identity and experiences, it offers a pretty inspirational model for engaged, inventive, and visionary citizenship that I think could be expanded to include a lot of creatives.
Detail of Reilly’s installation Road Drawings at Moon-Randolph Homestead
What are you up to now (post Open AIR)?
I just returned home from a residency at the Aquarium Gallery in New Orleans. I spent that time really digging into how I could make my creative practice more adaptable and agile. New Orleans’s gridded street system bends with the curve of the Mississippi River. You can walk a mile and have no idea how you got where you ended up, because somewhere along the way the grid shifted. And the whole time you’re hearing all this jazz music on street corners and coming out of bars that’s fluid and ever-changing and sometimes totally improv. It really felt like the embodiment of the ideas I’d begun thinking about at Open AIR.
Back at home, I’m channeling all of that energy and inspiration into a collection of furniture and objects that I’m hoping to have complete and in hand by the spring. I’m in design and prototype mode right now, playing with materials and shapes and symbols. It’s a lot of work but in tandem I always think of winter as the time to hunker down, make soup, and read. By accident I acquired a lot of nun-centric fiction in the past few weeks, so recently I’ve been reading about medieval nuns and their connection to craft. And listening to a lot of pop music. It’s a great time for pop.
Collaboration with 2023 Open AIR resident Jasmine Gutbrod, inspired by the invasive Spotted Lanternfly
Watch Reilly Create with Marquee Letters
See Reilly’s Artist Talk!
