Reena Spaulings is a collective project in the medium of a novel, artist persona, and institutional art gallery active from 2005 to present in New York City.
The novel of Reena Spaulings begins as a branch of the Bernadette Corporation under John Kelsey, under the publishing company Semiotext(e) in New York in 2004.
Reena Spaulings, the protagonist, is introduced through a series of oxymorons for her physical identity, including “young and ugly and beautiful”.
Chapter 4 The next day, Reena works at the gallery and provides an overview of the paintings she's guarding, including Manet's Young Lady in 1866.
Chapter 6 The narrator describes male models and rappers alike wrestle and exchange stories while watching a tornado from their New York apartment window.
Reena ponders and criticizes the beauty industry for the exploitation of the female form for marketing purposes, and soon after thinks about killing Maris.
Chapter 9 The unnamed narrator, male in form this time, meets Reena in a pipe system beneath the city where both met with gossip and rumours.
In a drug-like trip, the two characters are flushed into an open field where they become sick and engage in a series of long, drawn-out sexual encounters.
The next day, Reena and Garson take a boat ride in the park, likening the experience to a William turner painting.
Chapter 12 Reena and Maris go to the movies, watching a series of intense films including a cowboy zombie attack in a cemetery and a woman going on a killer spree in a hospital after distrusting one of her nurses with a breast exam.
Chapter 14 Maris and Reena attend a Cancer fundraiser to watch a performance by the Strokes, gathering with an audience of celebrities.
The narrator ponders life, stating that death is omnipresent and Maris cries on Reena's shoulder, confessing her fear that she will never have a child.
Thus, breaking the narrative structure to encompass multiple experiences and interventions within the text, including paragraphs starting with "for immediate release" touching on themes of death, body, and murder.
The novel is in complete chaos, jumping from locations in New York, disrupting the text on page, and describing sexual experiences and personal encounters.
However, the narrator states that they do not miss the city and that the next time they greet the reader, the entity will have blossomed into something bigger and more beautiful.
Artists who have actively identified with the alter-ego are Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey, two of the founders of the Reena Spaulings Art Gallery in New York.
[5] Reena Spaulings as an alter-ego also acts as an avatar, allowing for an expulsion of singular identity within the institutionalized art world, creating an anonymous guise for artistic production.
Spaulings installs the flags on a series of steel bars, which are decorated with tar, paint, mirror shards, and embroideries.
Willat, based on his observations of individuals and events in New York City, creates a series of videos, diagrams, and maps which display his findings.
The process of the work speaks to mathematics, using lines to break larger categories, sometimes defined by pictures or colour blocks, into smaller subsections.
[8] The title of The Strange Attractor is derived from a chaotically-formed pattern, inspired by the mathematical and scientific conclusions from Willat's findings.
Merlin Carpenter viewed the appropriation as an attack against their work, thus, proving the ego to be a flexible and sometimes controversial guise of artistic integrity regarding commercial institution.