About
You travel among the Douglas Fur and then the sagebrush, moving from damp ash to dry dirt road, teetering along cliffsides, then cliff walls. It smells like hot earth, then sticky pine, seventy feet beneath you. You left this morning in search of something—a broken building, a fable, or a hot spring, maybe—but now you've fallen backward into a cave. Small shacks dot the meadow, their doors still hanging from hand-forged hinges. If you look up, you'll see a constellation in the tin roof. Apple trees, rusted metal, and broken pottery grow from the soil; the deeper you dig, the more you hope to find. Everywhere, ore-filled mountains take a new shape, serving as your compass. Crushed lava rock from below, circled by turkey vultures from above, you accept this preoccupation as a dowsing rod, and from its tines, the endless direction casts the perfect shadow.
Responsive to natural and constructed landscapes, Reichert’s pursuit lies somewhere between documentation and abstraction of a multitude of dizzying landscapes—citations of place, their ruins, troubles, and mythology. A silver brooch inspired by an abandoned shack, an interactive outdoor sculpture exploring fragility and place, or a series of plaster-cast lava rocks set in silver, pulled from the physical landscape. She attempts to offer intimate reflections of truth-passing, fictitious geographies. Each work becomes referential component parts, void of origin.
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Rachel Reichert lives and works in Milwaukee, WI, and Idaho City, ID. Rooted in a practice of craft, Reichert’s work exists at the intersection of art making and place-building, ranging from jewelry, small sculpture, installation, and photography to building museums, artist residencies, and other ephemeral spaces and experiences.
She co-founded The Atlanta School in 2014, an experimental art school and artist residency in Atlanta, Idaho, where the mountain town became a community building and artmaking laboratory for nearly a decade. In 2015, she began a seven-year commitment to planning, rebuilding, and programming the James Castle House, a historic home and artist residency where self-taught artist James Castle lived and worked for over forty years. In 2022, she completed the restoration of the Erma Hayman House, a historic home and contemporary cultural space. She joined the team at Ruth Foundation For The Arts in 2022.
She sees art making and place-building as one practice.