Re/Assemble: Reed Anderson and Alex Ebstein

Washington, D.C

PFA is pleased to announce Re/Assemble, a duo presentation featuring the work of Alex Ebstein and Reed Anderson. Bringing both artists’ practices into direct conversation, the exhibition investigates collage, sites of activity, and artistic intervention through processes of unmaking and reconstitution. Together, Ebstein and Anderson challenge the structural stability of form and material—offering artworks as indexes of gesture, embodiment and reconsideration.

Re/Assemble will be on view at PFA–Washington D.C., located at 1932 9 ½ Street NW, Washington D.C., 20001, from September 12 through October 3, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, September 12, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM.

Re/Assemble situates itself within broader dialogues surrounding material culture and the history of cut-out practices. Both artists make a case for a radical rereading of material, shape, subject and technology, through quietly charged works. While rooted in modern abstraction, the artists subvert traditional boundaries of the picture plane. Through formal abstractionist approaches of combining colours and shapes, both artists use ready-mades as a departure point, remixing memories, scrambling associations and opening up relationships between object, form and concept. 

Alex Ebstein manipulates industrial and found materials, presenting yoga mats, craft materials and 3D printed facsimiles as richly textured mixed media collages. Slicing into surfaces usually used by bodies in motion,  Ebstein, creates lithe, organic forms that balance and echo across new patterns. Subverted from their original fabrication, the materials are mutable and reworked as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the contortions required of bodies seeking out ever-illusory ideals of contemporary wellness culture. In new works presented in this exhibition, Ebstein’s addition of PLA printed textures introduces a precise, controllable process to highlight the blurring of digitally altered and hand-manipulated form.  By turning tools of consumerist ‘self-care’ into artworks which reveal an aesthetic collision of tactility and concept, Ebstein engages with the readymade as both material and content. 

In dialogue, Reed Anderson engages with the formalism of painting as a sewn object, crafting work from new and recycled rip-stop nylon, found most often in spinnaker sails, kites, burgees and sports banners.  With an interest in texture, the newer material crinkles with crisp freshness while the older fabrics carry with it history and signs of use.

For Re/Assemble, Anderson presents four new works, three large flags and a banner, to continue his investigations into the language of flags as both personal and cultural signifiers. Anderson queries the polemic nature of the flag as a constructivist emblem of  inclusion and division. The colorful fabrics, used to drift across water bodies or convey streamlined communication, become abstract kinetic sculptures finding dialogue with sculpture and painting alike The flags Players and Dig-Dug recall 1980s pop culture, fashion and early digital game graphics, as is suggested by their titles. Using block printed geometry, which recurs often in the background of Anderson's cut paper works, in the flags this technique has found a place at center stage. As a large banner, stretching across the space, Sex, Lies and Videotape diverges from the singularity of flags, embodying a temporal quality that moves like film or musical score. It sits across the viewing plane, asking the viewer to move around them for them to be seen. 

By pairing Ebstein’s dense, tactile assemblages with Anderson’s translucent, floating banners, Re/Assemble highlights the construction of forms, calls for a reconsideration of manual labor and a reframing of our relationship to and use of everyday objects.