Jennifer Wynne Reeves "Second Coming: Backstage at the Dildo Ballet"
Galeria Ramis Barquet (Chelsea)
This event has ended.
Ramis Barquet Gallery presents "Second Coming: Backstage at the Dildo Ballet", a solo exhibition of the recent work of Jennifer Wynne Reeves.
Over the last two decades, with wanton disregard for categories or boundaries, Reeves has laid herself bare. In this her fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, she continues her multi-layered dialogue between representation and abstraction, word and image, spirituality and sex, photography and painting, weaving them all into an open- ended narrative. In her own words “I’m not bothered that the borders are blurred. Grey is my favorite color – it makes all the other colors brighter, gently revealing their beauty rather than blasting them with overcooked light.”
Reeves’ world is earnest and heartfelt, stark realities set within flat Midwestern landscapes. Mixing hard and soft molding paste with pigment she creates a frosting-thick impasto that in her most recent work literally reaches out of the canvas. Familiar characters made of thick daubs of paint, wire and found objects interact in photographs; brides, grooms, couples and lovers exposed and vulnerable. In Second Coming, Reeves takes us behind the scenes into the dark recesses, directing her characteristic volleys of text into an altogether more revealing place.
As ever Reeves refuses to keep her feelings to herself, though her fusillades are now aimed away from her traditional targets to somewhere much closer to home. Pent-up frustrations are released onto the canvas with the visual and verbal elements co-existing in stark contrast. In Divine Imagination and Her Kandinsky Dildo, a veiled schematic bride reaches towards her tumescent groom before a receding highway, flanked by the text Take, eat, this is my body. Playful, perverse, innocent and haunting, Reeves creates a naïve and nostalgic world forcibly disrupted by the abstractions of reality.
Jennifer Wynne Reeves was born in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1963 and lives and works in the Catskills, New York. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally at galleries including Joan Prats in Barcelona, Art + Public in Geneva, Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome, and Ramis Barquet in Monterrey and New York. Reeves’ work has also been shown in the Misumi Collection at the Tottori Prefectural Museum in Japan, the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, and is in the permanent collection of the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts.
Media
Schedule
from March 31, 2011 to May 07, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-03-31 from 18:00 to 18:00