Jennifer Wynne Reeves “Blobscapes”

BravinLee Programs

poster for Jennifer Wynne Reeves “Blobscapes”
[Image: Jennifer Reeves "Bitter Sweet" (2005) gouache, acrylic on paper, 11 x 14 in.]

This event has ended.

I start to paint. I squeeze out lumps on the palette. One little blob speaks to me. He seems to say, “I am the sun. You revolve around me.” I swipe at him with my brush and lay a piece of him on the canvas. I say, “I am the sun. You revolve around ME!” And so the conversation goes until the end of the piece when the paint is silenced and the silence is golden.

Jennifer Wynne Reeves, Facebook post, November 17, 2012

Jennifer Wynne Reeves (1963-2014) lived her art and life brazenly. Playing with pigment was a primal manifestation and solace of her personhood. Her representations embrace and aim towards abstraction, just as her abstraction is always driven by narrative. Morphing reality and abstraction, anxious ambiguity is Reeves’ chosen meaning. Enacted on open, neutral stages, her self-proclaimed. proscenium-staged slugs then blobs of paint assert the dilemma of singular existence. Nature and built structures are vital props of her reality while often vehemently confounding their purpose and function. Her art resounds with sensibility: a distinctly specific and quirky personal style and set of motifs that assert and memorialize her fierce individuality and independence.

Like other artists who died too young, Reeves’ art and personal intensity suggests she knew that her life might be unduly shortened. Her works morphed and shifted from drawing to painting to photography and proliferated within an increasing impulse to write. She made use of Facebook and other online formats to declare private thoughts as publicly as possible.

The works chosen for this exhibition incisively feature her far-ranging pictorial skill and her propensity to package big thoughts and feelings in small scale. Seductive yet prickly and hermetic yet driven to full disclosure, Reeves’ snapshots of her life and brain’s visions picture a distinct and idiosyncratic consciousness.

Patterson Sims, 2017

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Schedule

from February 10, 2017 to March 18, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-02-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

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