David Reekie

David Reekie's work is influenced by our reaction and adaptation to the society in which we live. We all live in a world that grows more complex and difficult to comprehend, with its tensions and temptations that pull us in different directions.  These conflicts provide ideas from which David creates characters and situations around which he builds scenarios and provides him with a constant source of material for his work. In recent years he has looked at the social and media driven pressures that have forced us to limit the way in which we live and he has devised surreal settings showing how we try to cope with the very limited and purely imagined space that we have created for ourselves.

In more these pieces David engages with man’s loss of identity and society’s attempt to make us all the same, and touch on the dangers of cloning and our loss of individuality.

The piece "Armed and Dangerous" is part of the Robot series started in 2003. In this series David took the image of a Robot and suggested that political figures in our society are so heavily influenced by the media, bureaucracy and peer pressure that they are becoming more robotic in their behaviour and their reaction to world events.

"I remember going to the cinema when I was nine years old to see ‘The Forbidden Planet’ and one of the highlights of the film, for me, was Robby the Robot. It was 1956 and the future was strange and sometimes frightening place. Although Robby was a friendly Robot, there were plenty of mindlessly driven, aggressive Robots in other films of that era."

Although this work has elements from the fifties and a young boy’s fascination with films, toys and the future, it also poses questions about life today and our ability to make our own decisions rather than follow unquestioningly the thoughts and ideas of others.

Whilst these works do warn us about certain individuals in our society, they are also optimistic pieces. After all they are only toys of our making and we can throw them away.