Current Exhibition:

Reflections

15 January – 19 February, 2021
at The Art Base


click to view
click for press release
click for review in Aspen Times

Reflections is a series of 22 digital photographs by Dede Reed that are “soft, dream-like color images of fruit, flowers, vessels, and books.” Reed places her subjects (fruit, flowers, vessels and books) in front of a Bakelite tray and photographs the reflection in the tray to create these quiet, meditative photographs. Reed explains: “The light from the black surface absorbs the reflections in a soft, lustrous way. Construction paper placed underneath adds color to the still lifes. The images, printed on Cranes Museo paper, shimmer with luminosity and are reminiscent of monoprints.”

Each photograph is for sale. For images and to buy, please visit our online gallery. The artist is generously donating 100 percent of the sales to the Art Base.

 

Cantaloupe Apple Pear

 

Press for Velvet Spring

Kirkus Review


“ A rich, deeply felt, but never sentimental novel.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Reed’s debut novel explores how the disruptions of history affect the interconnected lives of several women in communist Czechoslovakia. In August 1968, during a Soviet invasion, a baby girl is left outside a peasant woman’s house in Czechoslovakia, the name “Zofie” embroidered on her blanket. The woman, Ursula, takes her in. When Zofie is 11, a Communist Party apparatchik notes her intelligence, offers to help her learn German, and lends her books, which are transformative. Zofie experiences familial warmth for the first time when she’s invited to her classmate Katarina Vacek’s summer cottage, where she spends three summers. Later educated in Prague, Zofie immerses herself in its culture, becoming a translator for the education ministry, which becomes less subject to censorship as communism loses its grip. Next, Ursula tells her brief story: She didn’t speak until she was 8—her muteness a kind of spell that a circus dwarf breaks by asking her name and age. The next section tells the heartbreaking tale of Zofie’s mother, Maria, who’s separated from her baby daughter by the invasion. Now married and living in Wales with her son, Maria’s inquiries regarding Zofie’s location have led to nothing, and she must live with sorrow, regret, and uncertainty. The novel then takes up Zofie’s story again, as well as that of Natasa, Katarina’s orphaned daughter, whom Zofie takes in; painting helps Natasa heal her broken memories. Throughout this novel, Reed renders her characters’ different first-person points of view with the toughness and delicacy of a dancer en pointe whose grace belies a foundation of pain. Although tragedy runs through the broken mother-daughter relationships, each character manages to find meaning and beauty in the world through art. Even Ursula, whose words are so often trapped within herself, vividly remembers making a mobile out of string, a dead butterfly, feathers, and other bits and pieces. Not that art is easy; Zofie, for example, risks much when working on samizdat (banned literature), and it’s photography that takes Maria out of the country at a crucial time. Reed handles such ironies with intelligence and skill in this fine debut.

 

The San Francisco Book Review
 

The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and began their twenty-year communist rule of that country. To say that lives were changed irrevocably would be a drastic understatement. 

Told in four sections, Dede Reed’s debut novel, Velvet Spring, begins in the years leading up to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and focuses on the interconnected lives of four women who must find a way to navigate through life in such tumultuous conditions. 

In the first section, we are introduced to Zofie. Left on the doorstep of Ursula, a peasant woman, with nothing but a blanket with her name embroidered on it, Zofie is taken in and cared for but not, in her mind, really loved or wanted. Zofie grows up, goes to school, and makes friends, always feeling like an outsider no matter where she is. One particular friend, Katrina, invites her to her summer house to stay with her family, which results in relationships and experiences that change her life forever. 

Next, we hear Ursula’s story, told in letters to Zofie in a staccato voice that is beautifully representative of the woman. Emotions are no easier for her to express on paper than they are in person. Almost reluctantly and seemingly accidentally, she reveals so much that helps us understand her, such as the fact that she was mute until the age of eight, when a circus dwarf asked her for her
name and age. 

Maria, Zofie’s mother, is the next to speak, through a journal she keeps for her daughter. She tells of her idyllic childhood and the tragedies that befell her later. After the death of her mother and the resulting depression of her father, Maria finds love and becomes pregnant. She leaves her daughter for a few days to go to Vienna at her father’s request. It is 1968, and she is not permitted to return to Czechoslovakia and Zofie. 

In the last two sections we are back with Zofie and Natasa, whom she adopted upon the death of her parents, Katrina and Georg. 

Reed beautifully constructs characters and weaves an intricate and poignant web in which they all connect. The stories, though tragic and painful, are told with compassion and compel the reader to continue in the hope of, if not a happy ending, a kind one. Reed’s conclusion gives us just that and left this reader with a smile and the feeling that these wonderful women would finally be given the peace they so much deserve.

The Manhattan Book Review
 

Velvet Spring by Dede Reed describes the touching, enduring link between mothers and daughters over the span of decades, across countries. Reed’s portrayal encapsulates the monumental, lasting imprint mothers and daughters leave on each other’s souls despite distance, time, and direct bloodline. Velvet Spring captures the inadvertent way some women become mothers as well as how some daughters find themselves seeking their mothers. Some mothers develop like Ursula, who adopted her daughter, and disclose, “At your first cry, I did not want you…After I softened. I would care for you. For a day, a week, forever.” Whereas other mothers, such as Maria, fall in love at first sight, expressing, “You’d gaze up at me, and I of course could not stop looking at you. Those first few days, the following weeks, the next months are memories I’ve sealed up perfectly like a winter scene in a globe that I need only rotate in my hand and feelings fall like snow.” Reed’s description thoughtfully demonstrates how mothers evolve in their own way in spite of intention and expectations. Not all women deliberately elect for or willingly relinquish the role of motherhood, as demonstrated in Reed’s work. Life’s unexpected twists and turns complicate and pleasantly surprise these relationships. These unpredictable circumstances leave a lasting imprint on daughters that they carry throughout life. Moreover, Velvet Spring considers how daughters long for and mimic their mothers. This simulation surfaces in the daughters care of their homes as well as their expressive artistry. Readers will lovingly appreciate the longing some daughters feel for their mothers. To fondly lament, “I can’t explain that I am looking for you in those paintings, and sometimes even begin to imagine you coming out of the woods, or walking through fields or sitting by the river.” Reed’s poetic language exceptionally captures the tenderness of mother-daughter relationships. To round out the work, Reed aptly merges attention-grabbing historical, geographic, and artistic elements that will intrigue and enchant readers. Incorporating the cityscapes and landscapes of several countries, Reed paints an elegant picture as the backdrop of this novel. Perfect for those young and old, Velvet Spring is a beautiful work that readers will return to again and again over the years, each time gaining new insight into maternal and familial relationships.